The Student Life Organisation

The Student Life Organisation, also known as the SLO, was, in my opinion, the biggest farce on campus, second to none other than French-educated Chemistry teachers. In my opinion, they should cut the crap and rename the SLO "Choueifat Gestapo."

Of decidedly negligible benefit to students, it served as nothing more than a gathering point of the administration's top chronies among the students. They exploited the ambition of otherwise intelligent young boys and girls to sell their souls to the administration's personal obsession with tracking down ridiculously over-burdened students who exhibited the slightest hint of disobedience.

The SLO actively maintained at least one or two students from every class who would report friends of theirs for cheating on the outrageously over-rated AMS exams. No doubt, cheating is a terrible offense, but it's one thing to properly track down miscreants and punish them, and something completely different to acquire names from informants just to track them down and superficially "suspend" them for a day.

Many students were caught through this policy of plain-clothed informants, some of them from among the upper strata of the class. Come university application time, however, nobody's records had any mention of these incidents. Personally, I'm glad they didn't put these incidents into students' records, because I don't really think what they did was so big a crime, but surely the administration knows better than me, someone at the receiving end of their policies.

In Grade 11, we had three weekly exams, every week (thus the name) which were full-fledged written exams with or without a multiple choice component. In addition to three hours of weekly exams, we had no less than five AMSs with their corresponding ridiculously high standards and bad implementation, which amounted to a total of 8 tests every week. Any student faced with these, coupled with the numerous external exams that we take, including SAT I, SAT II, APs and A-Levels, the workload is simply unacceptably high.

Students were driven to cheat, and the administration hunted them down, almost for sport, "suspend" them for periods at a time with no mention of these episodes in their academic records, which they knew were exemplary compared to students in other schools. Fed by a greed for more high-brass university acceptances, the administration would blatantly lie about students who partook in the hideous crime of cheating.

But if the administration didn't mention these incidents in their records, then surely the administration didn't think very highly of the offense. If they didn't think very highly of an offense they basically drove their students to, why install such oppressive policies to start with and initiate a fruitless game of cat and mouse?

The SLO played the cat in this story. Apart from that, it was also the central headquarters of the school's money-saving scheme, also known as the extracurricular point system, AMS-repeats and Thursday classes (so maybe in addition to "Choueifat Gestapo" it could also have been called "Choueifat SS"), and the ever-interesting SLOGA, the Student Life Organisation General Assembly, the yearly meeting that I once wasted a weekend on.