The perfect 'exam as metaphor for life' experience

Another crisis in Britain:

Sixth-formers have been left struggling with a second "impossible" question in this year's exams. Students sitting an AS-level business paper were faced with a question that did not include the information needed to give an answer...

A business teacher from Leicestershire told BBC News online that there were concerns among students that they had wasted so much time trying to answer the question that they had not left enough time to finish the paper...

An AQA spokesman said: "We are very sorry about the error in the paper. However, we do have a robust process for ensuring that none of our students will be disadvantaged as a result our mistake."

A great metaphor for life, which has no board of examiners to set things right. How many of us have tried and tried again to make something work which we eventually... painfully... reluctantly later admit was 'just not meant to be'? I can think of several personal relationships that would easily fall into this category, along with no small number of other undertakings which i was sure, at the time, were things i needed to be doing. Turns out there are some puzzles without solutions, some goals lacking all the requisite tools for success. Kudos to the UK educational system for trying to indoctrinate their students to believe otherwise, but in retrospect, the students may have ended up learning something much more important.