Overestimated

Even though the questions were not easy to answer, the question paper was designed in such a way that it was hard for the students to avoid the more difficult questions that would require several minutes to even think of the possible right answer.

As such, Shane hadn't answered the questions that would take longer in the beginning and skipped them to answer the simple questions in a matter of a few hours.

During the remaining time, he'd returned to the tricky ones and had answered the rest in a calm, yet steady manner.

To nobody's surprise, he had skipped the extremely difficult questions, but that was only obvious.

Why wasting time on something that would bring the same amount of points despite taking several times longer to answer?

Thus, Shane was able to become one of the 40 prodigies who had passed the first exam.

His score wasn't even bad, rather, his rank was in the late 10s.