Swimming tests

It looks like either my son is an amazingly fast healer, he is amazingly good at acting normal when in a lot of pain, or the doctor's diagnoses of a "broken bone" was a little off the mark! My children go to weekly swimming lessons and every two months they have a test to see if they can go up a level. Despite having a "broken arm" my son decided he really wanted to do it as it was his first real chance to go up from the "very basic class" to the intermediate class where the volume of swimming increases dramatically and therefore the speed of improvement also increases dramatically. The test he had to pass was to swim 25m backstroke in 45 seconds (46 seconds and you have to repeat again in another 2 months). The thing that really annoys me is that the only chance they get to try the 25m is the actual test. During the weekly practices they only get to try about 12m and therefore it takes for ever for them to actually get past the first big test and into the intermediate class. I think this is probably a ploy on the swimming school's part to get people to keep coming for a long time as a lot of people quit as soon as their child can swim 25m. Anyway, back to the test... I was just hoping my son would make it to the end to give him some confidence and wasn't worried about the 45 second time limit, but he ended up swimming the distance no problem and doing it in 35 seconds. Pretty good considering he has a "broken arm"!
My daughter also managed to pass her last test - 5om backstroke well within the 1 minute 15 second time limit. They both seem to be really enjoying it now (we had a few problems with teachers for a while...) and have made some good friends. Here's hoping it continues this way at least until they can both swim 50 meters freestyle.... next test for Emily and a year or two away for Masaki!