Our oldest is convinced she failed today’s high school entrance exam. She may have, but it might just be stress and panic talking.

The past couple weeks included occasional arguments between our oldest and She Who Must Be Obeyed about which school our oldest should try for. She chose, as her first choice, a high level public school with fairly strict admissions standards. However, before the final registration fee was paid, it was possible for her to register to sit the exam for a different, easier school.

Note: Most schools in Japan have their exams on the same day at the same time, with private schools having their exams a couple weeks earlier. This means students have to choose which schools they want carefully as they only get one chance at each type of school. I suspect there’s too much registration fee money involved for this to ever change to a single test system.

As parents our dilemma is that if our oldest doesn’t get into her first choice it’s going to cost us a lot of money to send her to the private school that is her second choice (and to which she’s already earned admission). It is also a good school, but it has private school tuition (and boys–more on that some other day).

This leads to the other dilemma: although changing to a slightly lower level school might increase her chances of admission, it can also hurt her chances for getting into a top tier university. Schools in Japan are ranked by academic prowess and by their ability to place students in good universities. (Both our oldest’s choices have good reputations in that regard.)

Unfortunately, the school handed out the answers after the exam and our oldest is pretty sure she messed up at least part of the mathematics section. She was in tears and apologizing for messing up. We got her calmed down and told her she deserved to relax for a while.

Now, however, we enter the phase of second guessing. She Who Must Be Obeyed is second-guessing the decision to let our oldest sit for the higher level school. Our oldest is doing the same thing.

I personally would rather have our oldest try for a school she likes rather than one we prefer or to hedge her bets by picking a lesser school.

She may have failed her exam, and it will cost us money if she did, but I’m glad she went for it. I’m proud of her for that.

We’ll find out what happened next Thursday when the school posts the results.