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I have done lots of searching and never found it. This site pointed me to Tunnel in the Sky but that isn't it. I have very vague memories of the book and heck it might have been terrible but I know I liked it in the 6th or 7th grade!

I remember that it involved a class or group of kids having to take a final on another planet by surviving without any supplies. The environment I don't think was supposed to actually kill anyone but it did with lethal animals and such. The hero kid managed to survive and some foil the plot. As sad as this is I do remember something about him and the girl that fought with him making love in zero g as one of the lines near the end or at the end.

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It sounds a bit like Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin. First published in 1968.

from the Amazon link:

In 2198, one hundred and fifty years after the desperate wars that destroyed an overpopulated Earth, Man lives precariously on a hundred hastily-established colony worlds and in the seven giant Ships that once ferried men to the stars. Mia Havero's Ship is a small closed society. It tests its children by casting them out to live or die in a month of Trial in the hostile wilds of a colony world. Mia Havero's Trial is fast approaching and in the meantime she must learn not only the skills that will keep her alive but the deeper courage to face herself and her world.

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  • Could you please give a bit more information here, rather than just a link?
    – Chenmunka
    Apr 9, 2015 at 11:26
  • To be honest its been at least twenty years since I read it and all I remember is a group of kids having to survive for a period of time on an unfamiliar planet. When I saw this question it sounded familiar and I did some googling and came up with that link. Its the book I remember but whether its the book the OP is looking for I don't know.
    – Colin Bell
    Apr 9, 2015 at 22:19
  • The protagonist of Rite of Passage is female, which seems to differ from the work being asked about.
    – Organic Marble
    Jun 8, 2015 at 15:51
  • The sexes are reversed, but otherwise near spot-on. Mia and Jimmy hook up on-planet just before rescue, and at the end of the book, in the epilogue five years later, they head home to bed. No zero-gee sex though.
    – ImaginaryEvents
    Jun 8, 2015 at 19:16
  • there was no zero-gee sex, but there was sex. They figured either [a] they would survive the rite of passage, be official adults, so the sexual activity was permitted, or [b] they would die, in which case it would not matter.
    – Winchell Chung
    Mar 30, 2019 at 1:32
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I remembering reading a book written by Monica Hughes in 1990 called Invitation to the Game that sounds similar.

Lisse and her seven friends are unemployed after graduating from a respected private school, and are assigned to live as a group in an abandoned warehouse in a Designated Area (DA)....

One day the group get invited to "The Game", which turns out to be a virtual-reality full-world simulation .... This simulation is based in an outdoor environment and the aim seems to be survival in this different climate....

They realize that The Game was a kind of training program meant to prepare the group- and others like them- for an off-world colony project ....

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  • 1
    Could you also outline the reason why you think the books are similar? Common plot points, or maybe a summary?
    – Gallifreyan
    Apr 24, 2017 at 6:05
  • I don't think it's a match, but this is the closest bits of the Wikipedia summary that fit
    – FuzzyBoots
    Apr 24, 2017 at 11:32

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