Pakistan-origin girl conquers Britain’s hardest school tests with 23 A levels
text_fields
Mahnoor Cheema passed 23 A levels. The average candidate takes just 3 A levels. The A stands for Advanced Level.
Eighteen-year-old Miss Cheema lives in Slough, which is 20 miles west of London. The town is 30% ethnically South Asian. She is from a Muslim family. She has been awarded a place to study medicine at Oxford University. Medicine has a 5% acceptance rate at Oxford.
Grades for A level range from A* (pronounced ‘A star’), A, B, C, D, E, and below that is grade U, which has no value. Even a grade E means the student has achieved something.
Mahnoor Cheema is an academic supernova. She is outstanding not just in scientific subjects but in humanities and languages too. There was not enough time in the school day for the school to teach her most of those subjects. Thus, she taught 19 out of 23 subjects herself.
The UK South Asian community has a reputation for embracing academic opportunities. British Indians sometimes arrived in low-status jobs such as waiters, postmen, and cleaners, but their children became doctors, dentists, accountants, and IT specialists. The Indian work ethic is widely recognised in the United Kingdom.
White Britons tend to take education for granted. The United Kingdom has had publicly funded schooling since 1870. From 1943 to 1998, university was free of charge.
Mahnoor said her parents did not pressurise her, but in fact told her not to strain herself. Yet she was determined.
Mahnoor’s parents come from Lahore, Pakistan. They moved to the United Kingdom just before Mahnoor was born. Her father is a barrister. She has two younger siblings.
Hyperlexic Mahnoor had no difficulty speed-reading books and memorising information. She is not just Miss Memory. Clearly, she had problem-solving skills too. She is an extremely fast learner and insists that she has time to do fun activities.
Miss Cheema would like to be a neurosurgeon. If such a genius is wielding the scalpel, it would not be so worrying to undergo such surgery. Is she fascinated by the brain because hers works so well?
