Comment is Free, but Not Necessarily Sensible

Posted on June 22, 2012 by Athene Donald

Just as I was leaving my office at the end of last week’s typically frenetic activities, I was caught on the phone with an invitation to write a Comment is Free piece on women in science for last Sunday’s Observer. The aim was to complement a news story being run on the incoming President of the RSC, Professor Lesley Yellowlees.  As the first woman to hold this role she has decided to use it as a platform to plug this important issue, as I described in a previous post. I am delighted to see the RSC re-engaging with this important topic after a few years of it slipping down the list of their priorities. And given the chance to use a national broadsheet as a platform to bring it to the attention of the wider public, I was not going to let the opportunity slip either.

So, I had Friday night and part of Saturday to meet my first ever journalistic deadline(quite generous really). It turned out to be a much tougher assignment than I had thought, because the word count was about half the length of most of my blogposts. This meant, as I discovered, that nuancing the text was well nigh impossible, or putting in all the evidence or a lengthy background to the story. I’d like to think this was why some of the comments were quite so daft and wide of the mark, rather than that some people out there remain hideously misogynistic and ignorant of reality. But maybe I’m an optimist.  I will try to deconstruct some of the more unbelievable comments below.

I completed a first draft on Friday night, but wasn’t really satisfied with it. So I sought a second opinion on the Saturday – from my husband. He also wasn’t very happy with what I’d written, felt it would just provoke responses of ‘diddums’ . So he suggested some replacement sentences. Interestingly, the ones he wrote are exactly the ones that provoked the most ire on the grounds they were sexist. I find that somewhat amusing, even if depressing. Men too can feel that ‘aggressive men with one-track minds’ describes too many men and that they don’t like it.

By the time I looked at the web on the Sunday morning at around 8am, already more than 80 people had commented. Some people, it would seem, just sit there waiting for articles to disagree with in a public forum. So,here are some of the issues that were raised – on the CIF website and through twitter – and my thoughts on them.

Macho

Of course I didn’t write the headline ‘End the Macho Culture that turns Women off Science’, some editor took a casual mention of the word macho in the final paragraph (which tied in with Lesley Yellowlees’ terminology) and turned it into the hook for the whole piece. In fact I use macho in this context as describing someone ‘having a strong or exaggerated sense of power or the right to dominate’, to quote one dictionary, not as something only associated with men as I spelled out previously. I would say Maggie Thatcher was macho; it is a trait that I find unattractive but certainly not restricted to men. However, that was the sort of nuance that got lost in my 550 words, and many got angry with the headline and their translation of it as necessarily anti-male. Interestingly, the defence of many seemed to be that science is full of nerds, geeks and boffins who are necessarily feeble so what was I talking about? Clearly I was ill informed. In fact many started to make…

Dangerous Assumptions 

It was assumed that Ms Donald could not know what she was talking about and – and this comment was my all-time favourite comment for sheer inaccurate unpleasantness –

Article number 132 of a disgruntled feminist targetting one area of society at a time and trying to shoe-horn her ideology into it and pick a fight where none exists in order to keep herself in employment. Anyone who thinks there’s a macho culture in science definitely hasn’t spent any time around scientists and is also scrapping the already well scraped bottom of the barrell. Time for a new career I would suggest, you’re not really cut out for journalism.

This commenter couldn’t even read the tagline which pointed out I was a professional scientist, but just assumed I was, as another put it, simply some sad journo writing

another rant by a Guardian pundit disconnected from the real world.

I do wonder how many of the commenters were themselves scientists, probably few or they wouldn’t have been so rude about us all being dweebs and losers. But they clearly believed they were more well-informed about what happens in science than poor old Ms Donald.

I wasn’t the only one who came in for flak. Sally Davies did too:

Dame Sally Davies should be sacked. She hasn’t any business funding research on any other basis that the excellence of that research and its medical promise. Awarding medical research funding on the basis of presentations on “Gender Issues” is a gross misuse of public funds, an abuse of power and is tantamaount to fraud.

(Spelling as in the original.) Interesting assumption to make, that by working to improve issues around gender she is likely to reduce the overall excellence of the research.

PhD is an Ordeal

This was the topic where probably cutting out words caused most problems. I used the quote that women found their PhD’s an “ordeal filled with frustration, pressure and stress”, but the full story (which I’d reported on before) made it clear many men did too. People seemed to assume that I was implying women were feeble things that couldn’t cope with this rather than, as I’d meant to convey, that I didn’t see why anyone should have to endure an experience that was unnecessarily unpleasant. However I rather thought people responded as if it was a case of ‘I was beaten when a child and it didn’t do me any harm, so let’s continue to beat our children’. PhD’s may be hard work, challenging, but they should also be exciting and stimulating and not simply an ordeal. Of course, I’d put the link to the report in to the online article so people could have read the whole thing if they’d wanted, rather than to assume whatever they wanted to assume from a single sentence. But then, some of these would seem to be people who prefer to complain than to think.

Cherrypicking the Research

I was accused of cherry picking the research I quoted because I used physics as an extreme example. I would have loved to be able to compare physics and biology and where the leaks predominantly occur in the different disciplines. The overall length did not permit, but it wouldn’t have altered my basic premise.

Nursing Mothers

One commenter said helpfully that

It is a rare woman who can think about string theory or the mathematics of population genetics while nursing a baby.

This caused a lot of people to explode with ire over twitter and in the online comments. Comments included

My personal fav is the guy who said you can’t think about string theory while breastfeeding. Really? How does he know?!

I think nursing time, and bedtime often great time to think about science – not much else to do than think..

and more than one person indicated that they stopped reading the comments at this point:

Going to stop reading comments on Athene Donald’s Observer piece due to extreme depression about human race.

Is Alice Roberts a Real Scientist?

Finally, people got waylaid into what strikes me as an irrelevant discussion as to whether Professor Alice Roberts  – whom I’d identified as one possible very visible role model for girls contemplating entering science – was a real scientist, by which they seemed to mean a practicing research scientist. She is certainly a woman who read science at university and is now leading a very successful, and presumably satisfactory, career in the scientific domain. Is academic research the only way to be a scientist? I think not, particularly when it comes to trying to convey to schoolchildren contemplating their futures what careers scientists have and for whom ‘research’ probably means little more than looking up stuff on Wikipedia. On the other hand, was it right to use her as the rather more glamorous image to top my story – as the online version did – than the standard photo the Guardian has of me which the print copy used? Or is this simply another way of drawing the reader in with an attractive image, which a middle-aged woman, who just happened to have written the piece, might not manage?

So, an interesting experience overall. If I discount the vitriol tossed off by inveterate CIF commenters, I can take more satisfaction from the fact the article was picked up on websites around the world, with people as far afield and as different in culture as Australia, Malta and Portugal all agreeing that what I wrote rang true in their own part of the world. But girls being put off science is not a story that is going to go away. Just look at the EU Science is a Girl Thing website, where the EU is trying to tempt more girls into science. But whatever you do, don’t look at the taster video…unbelievably inappropriate, and also viral. I hope by next week someone will have had the good sense to pull it, although some of the other parts of the site are probably helpful for teenagers, despite the lipstick logo which pervades it.

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in Equality, Women in Science | Tagged , , | 33 Comments

Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost

Posted on June 18, 2012 by Athene Donald

Last week I spotted these words from Tolkien emblazoned on a poster (indeed several copies) on the walls of the tunnel which joins Imperial College and South Kensington Station. They seemed curiously apposite given what I had just been doing, contributing to a discussion of careers as part of the Life Sciences Post-Doc Symposium at Imperial. I would like to think the attendees at the meeting came away feeling the truth of the words.  You can see more about the whole day from the blog of the organiser, Paula Salgado.

The plight of postdocs has featured often previously on my blog (e.g. here and here), elsewhere on Occam’s Typewriter (e.g from Jenny Rohn here and elsewhere) and many other places besides. The most recent article I saw was in last week’s Times Higher Education, written by an anonymous humanities postdoc who asked

not to be identified in case this further affects his career prospects.

The problem is that there is an oversupply of postdocs chasing the few permanent faculty positions available – and this holds, as far as I can tell, across all disciplines. This is not a problem restricted to the UK either. The numbers economist Paula Stephan quotes for the US in her recent book How Economics Shapes Science are just as unpleasant reading, with a total population of around 36,500 postdocs currently in post, of whom about 60% are in the life sciences.  According to her, more than 70% of the postdocs in one study were found to be ‘very interested’ in a job (presumably permanent) at a research university and consequently a very large number were going to end up being disappointed.

There are many aspects to this problem, but one of the key ones is identified by the anonymous writer in Times Higher Education, namely that pursuing any career other than as an academic is too often equated with ‘failure’, implicitly writ large in red letters on one’s forehead. This is something we who have ‘made it’ in academia are clearly guilty, even if inadvertently, of imposing on our students and postdocs. Not everyone is cut out to be an academic, however much they may think it looks a desirable career choice, and we should do our utmost to make it plain that the skills learned during years in the lab can be taken fruitfully elsewhere. The point of the panel discussion I was involved with at Imperial was to point out both that other career options can be totally satisfying, and that not everyone goes in a straight line from A to B, and the end destination B may be far removed from any original lifeplan anyhow. There was a lot of combined wandering on show from the panel members, none of whom I think would have described their career paths as necessarily well-thought out or optimised, but all had arrived at a position that satisfied them in the end.

You may think that my own academic path must have been clear-cut, but you’d be wrong, as I’ve written about in passing before (here  and here), but I have actually never strayed outside the academic fold. My fellow panellists had had more varied careers. One who had wandered in and out of academia was Jesus Rogel-Salazar, now a lecturer in mathematics at the University of Hertfordshire, but after 3 postdocs in different departments at Imperial he had actually wandered as far as the City, where he worked for a number of years before being lured back by the attractions of academia. He didn’t sound lost to me. Then there was Georgina Ferry, respected author and journalist, who had changed fields between A levels and university, and had swapped jobs repeatedly thereafter before ending up as a very successful freelance writer. Both Mike Whelan and Tim Atkins, respectively from Biotech company iQur and the Government Laboratory DSTL had probably weaved around a bit less, but certainly neither had known as they worked on their PhD’s how their life was going to shape up. Finally Julia Heathcote talked about the different jobs she’d had, and mainly hated, before she’d fallen by accident into teaching at a FE college and found she loved it. All these individuals seemed to rate their job satisfaction high and none of them showed any signs of feeling the stigma of failure for having not pursued an academic career (though to be fair Georgina Ferry had never taken a PhD or been through the postdoc mill).

One problem for me as an academic Is that I am not well-informed about alternative careers, but I and my colleagues should at least be able to point researchers in the direction of those who do know and avoid implying that I see such a move away from academic research as letting the side down. Some of one’s students and postdocs one knows from day 1 are the superstars of the future, and it is a delight to watch them mature and flourish and establish their own independent careers. But the percentage of students in that category is, unsurprisingly, not that high. Some postdocs are equally obviously not really motivated and probably have drifted into staying on in academia because they haven’t a clear idea of what else to do. These are the ones who should be pointed immediately in the direction of the Careers’ Service because it does neither the individual nor the PI any favours to keep them on. The difficult ones to advise are the majority in the middle, who may have been unlucky so far, or may still be maturing as scientists, but it is hard to know whether to encourage them to stay the course, keep trying for fellowships and independence or to recognize that they may be better off exploring other options.

However for all of them the road ahead may be tortuous, possibly bumpy and exciting, possibly smooth, easy or even maybe boring, but not going in a straight line may actually be exactly the right thing for them to do while they home in on what ultimately turns out to be their niche. It would be nice if, as discussed at the Willetts Roundtable last autumn at the Royal Society, and also in the Wilson Report (which was more concerned with studentships, as I discussed here), postdocs were able to spend some time away from academia exploring other avenues in some appropriate placement. I still hope that BIS will have been thinking about this since we gathered round that Roundtable last autumn with the Minister, and that some follow-up or tangible outcome may yet be forthcoming, but if so no whisper of it has reached me yet. But the important thing for postdocs is not to believe it’s academia or bust, and for us, the supervisors, it is equally important our actions clearly convey that message.

Posted in Careers | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Do All Male Shortlists Matter?

Posted on June 13, 2012 by Athene Donald

I was challenged to write on this topic through Twitter, after Times Higher Education ran a story about the task of finding a new President and Provost to replace Malcolm Grant at UCL.  The five names mentioned as ‘figures who might fit the bill’ were all male. An all male shortlist was also implied in the BBC’s Pallab Ghosh’s recent story on the next Government Chief Scientific Advisor, although it wasn’t clear whether this was the actual shortlist or just (as seems more likely) a guesstimate or even well-informed gossip on the part of the BBC; anyhow the implication was the names given were just part of the shortlist. Indeed, it would seem (more of this below), the head-hunters were still head-hunting at the time the list was posted on the web, so its absolute accuracy is certainly in question.

Nevertheless, it is the case, that two very high profile jobs are being talked about in the media in connection with male names only. Does this matter? Uta Frith, writing in the New Statesman in the wake of this year’s elections to the Royal Society with its disappointingly low number of women, said

An all-male list of candidates for the next chief scientist appeared on Twitter on 26 April. It immediately drew pointed comments. From now on, not including any woman in the lists of candidates for the top science jobs, or for fellow of the Royal Society and other prestigious prizes, will no longer be acceptable in polite society.

However, despite the fact that on the surface I entirely agree with this position and all those other commenters who have cried foul over these various recent occurrences, on reflection I think we have to be careful in jumping to conclusions; there may be extenuating circumstances that the published names obscure. Firstly, neither of these lists actually have any standing. We do not know, nor should we know, who are on the shortlist. Maybe there are women going to be interviewed, we can’t tell. However, I think things are more subtle than that.  In order to get on a shortlist for jobs like these, two separate things have to happen.

  1. The head hunters (or search committee, depending on the situation) have to come up with your name. On this front, my arguments are not dissimilar to those I advanced previously referring to this year’s Royal Society elections. I argued there that some of the problems stem from the fact that women may not be being nominated for election – their own communities may be overlooking them. Women are not infrequently somehow invisible and hence forgotten, as I’ve discussed in the past. This is a problem that needs to be thought about; anyone who is approached by head hunters to come up with suggestions for names should be very conscious of it and do what they can to ensure that first class individuals, who may not be the obvious ones and may come from a minority of some type (sub-discipline, gender, geography etc), are not omitted from consideration.
  2. The individual has to be attracted to the job sufficiently to allow their name to go forward.  Now, if you are a woman and the idea of being head of UCL or Chief Scientific Advisor fills you with no joy whatsoever, for whatever reason, you are not likely to let your name go forward just to ensure that there is some possibility of a female name making the shortlist. That would be an act of extreme altruism and why should any woman do that just so that people can feel honour has been satisfied? No man would feel ‘obliged’ to let their name go forward if they thought the job was unattractive, as I’m sure many may in these cases. Flattered to be asked, men and women alike may feel, but flattery is not sufficient to go for a major job if it doesn’t appeal.

However, one might want to ask whether women who aren’t keen for their names to go forward are unwilling simply because they are being timid: maybe they’re not convinced they’re up to the task, or perhaps uncertain about work-life balance or the need to relocate their families. In other words, they’re being wimpish and need encouragement. Well maybe yes and maybe no. Again who knows, but I find it hard to believe that a woman of the stature to be considered for these senior appointments is likely to be of the particularly wimpish variety. And I am certain the head hunters did approach women for the CSA post. (You will also note the new role of Chief Scientific Advisor to the European Commission is now occupied by Anne Glover, who was CSA for Scotland prior to her appointment. Proof positive that some  women may be interested enough to be appointed to such roles!)

I am, as I’ve said before, all in favour of positive action. Positive action means, in this case, trying as hard as you can to find diverse candidates. Once the Pallab Ghosh story came out on the BBC website it would seem the head hunters felt under some (even more?) pressure to find a woman,  possibly any woman, who would agree to go forward to be able to satisfy the critics. One senior – and retired – woman I know felt some annoyance at being approached by them at this point since she felt, not unreasonably, that being retired she wasn’t credible (or interested). It looked like cynical action on behalf of the head hunters. In the days of US affirmative action policies, underqualified women were sometimes offered – and took up – positions to their own and the company’s subsequent regret. Approaching non-credible women to satisfy some notional female ‘quota’ on a shortlist strikes me as no better.

So, before we pillory head hunters et al for being blind about names tossed around in contention for senior positions, we should be aware of what may be going on behind the scenes.  Unless head hunters suddenly decide to become universally transparent and name everyone who has been approached and their reasons for declining if they do so – which would be a catastrophe – we have to realise that while senior women remain in such small numbers, statistically it may be quite possible for none to appear on a shortlist, however diligent the search may have been. (The corollary to this is that where numbers aren’t small we most definitely should generally expect women to be on shortlists, for instance for lectureships or fellowships.) But, we should continue to apply pressure to ensure that that diligence is never missing, and continue to ask awkward questions when opportunities present themselves so that organisations know that laziness when it comes to seeking out minorities will not be tolerated.

Posted in Equality, Women in Science | Tagged , , , | 14 Comments

Red Ink, Green Ink

Posted on June 8, 2012 by Athene Donald

Exam marking being much on my mind, as discussed in the last post, I was thinking about the way we annotate the scripts as we mark. The practice I am familiar with (although I have no idea how standard this is, even across Cambridge) is to use red ink for first marking and green for second.  This approach has the advantage it removes all ambiguity about who has written what. Since one of the crucial roles of the second marker is to check that the first is capable of adding together the scrawled marks and entered them correctly both on the cover sheet and – even more importantly – in the Excel spreadsheet that represents the ‘markbook’, it is necessary that the marks from first and second markers can be distinguished. Hence the need for colour coding (apologies to all who are colour blind, for whom this colour scheme is clearly less than optimal, although I have never heard this raised as an objection. No doubt purple and orange would work as well. The use of any colours other than those a student might use is, no doubt, the relevant criterion).

But when it comes to commenting on the writing of PhD students, away from the exam scene, what colour(s) are appropriate?  I typically use whatever pen comes to hand as I scribble on draft papers or theses. I am not yet entirely comfortable with the paperless office, and on a train I find pens definitely easier to wield than commenting on the document on screen (although the students may find my writing hard to decipher if the journey was too bumpy). In my office red may be the pen of choice, but on trains I rarely find a red pen to hand. However, I have had students who object to red. Too stark, too in your face I’ve been told, please use any other colour, say green as softer, less abrasive. I am willing to oblige when this is explicitly requested, albeit I find it surprising. Does colour of ink really affect how students view my attempts to help them conform to some ideal of common scientific practice as well as linguistic clarity?

Writing a first paper draft, a progress report or a thesis draft can be a daunting matter, because so many students have rarely had a previous opportunity to try out their writing skills in extended prose at any point in their education – more’s the shame. Not so long ago I wrote about the need for a far higher proportion of the population to have decent quantitative skills, but it is equally true that scientists need to hone their skills in written (and oral) communication. This is not simply a case of flashy animations in Powerpoint or its cousins – they probably do get taught this, possibly ad nauseam.  No, I mean the ability not only to string a sentence together, but to understand how to frame an argument so that there is a logical flow, possibly over many pages. The need to understand (as one of my own ex-PhD students, who was by then a lecturer, expressed it when frustrated about their own students’ prose) that papers need to have a beginning, a middle and an end. We are not talking about writing stream of consciousness texts like Virginia Woolf, or chronological accounts of everything that went wrong with multiple experiments. No, we are talking about conveying complex ideas in an appropriate manner so that someone not involved with the research can make head or tail of it. It is a skill that isn’t taught and perhaps ought to be. (I should stress these comments all refer to UK-educated students, rather than those for whom English is a second language for whom the issues may be very different.)

I have heard it argued that alongside A levels, we should be seeking to inculcate basic mathematics skills into all our schoolchildren using (for those not pursuing an A level in maths itself) something akin to a Use of Mathematics exam, similar to the ideas I discussed in that earlier post. I was of the generation that went through a Use of English exam myself, again intended for those not studying that subject at A level. I was also subjected to training in the art of précis at O level, a skill I suspect is not taught anywhere in our schools currently. Although I didn’t appreciate it at the time, reading an extended piece of text and reducing it to 200 words – or any other number as prescribed – is probably something that has stood me in good stead every time I’ve had to write a literature survey or review. Even at primary school I was drilled in punctuation and parsing the parts of speech. Much of this I have probably forgotten, yet I suspect the basic structures lurk at the back of my brain, reinforced by five years of Latin. But for many students now progressing up the scientific ladder, such opportunities may never have offered themselves. Their courses may have required little more than multiple choice answers, or perhaps a sentence or two of explanation, at school. At university, how many tutors have got the red (or green) pen out to correct spelling or grammar in a write-up of an experiment or survey of some piece of the literature? We expect a lot of our students without actually necessarily helping them on their way.

Despite concerns about our language use more generally, the Queen’s English Society has just thrown in the towel, reckoning that people no longer see the point of good, clear English in this age of texts and tweets (anyhow it transpired nobody wanted to join or run their committee). As the Guardian reported, in recent times this society has

also highlighted deficiencies in the use of English by university undergraduates – more than 80% were unable to spell and use the word “effect” correctly, while 43% were unable to spell the word “miniature”.

I would agree – I frequently find myself getting my pen out to correct a student’s spelling of effect/affect. Another particular confusion that irritates me is the misuse of dependent/dependant. It is extraordinary to me how many parameters turn out apparently to be ‘financially or otherwise supported’ by temperature or concentration – not what is intended. However, I find my willingness to wield a red pen as a result of poor grammar (or spelling), or just bad, confusing style, can sometimes be too rampant. When reading published papers, reports or even novels I find myself metaphorically reaching for the pen too – bad style is not just the preserve of the unwary science student.

So, let us as scientists not be prepared to accept verbose, wandering prose, poor punctuation or a lack of clarity in what we write. We should each work on our own style whilst also doing all we can to encourage students to recognize the importance of clear expression, correct spelling and thesuccinct presentation of a logical train of thought. Otherwise we are not going to do anything to further the wider public’s appreciation of what we do and why we love it, even when opportunities present themselves. Right, now where is my red pen?

I realise by complaining about other people’s writing, I am at risk of being corrected myself for an apostrophe gone astray or the infelicities of my own language. Please don’t bother to comment on this!

Posted in Communicating Science | Tagged , , , | 17 Comments

How Not to Spend a Bank Holiday

Posted on June 4, 2012 by Athene Donald

While most of the country is thriving on a diet of bunting, boats on the Thames, nostalgia and street parties, many of us in Cambridge are struggling with more mundane matters. Exams. The University of Cambridge cannot afford, in its 8 week terms, to indulge in random days off. Students and examiners alike have to comply with a regulated timetable of examinations that has probably been largely unchanged over many years. Certainly I suspect I had exams myself on a Bank Holiday, and most definitely I had exams on Saturdays because I remember being somewhat fed up at this imposition as an undergraduate all those years ago.

This year I have a tight timetable to mark around 200 scripts of second year physics exams, but none of the remarks that follow should be taken to relate specifically to these particular papers. I have no desire to strike fear into those students who suspect their offerings are currently residing on my desk, so what I write here will simply be general thoughts. However, it is also written somewhat testily because I find myself resenting not being able to relax while the rest of the country takes time off to enjoy what appears to be typical Bank Holiday weather (I’ve had my head down on this batch, my second, since Friday). So, I am affording myself the luxury of writing this as a brief distraction to put off wading through another massive pile of answers. This weekend it has been particularly hard to focus due to noises off – ranging from the thumping of the amplified bass coming from the annual Strawberry Fair on Midsummer Common a few streets away all Saturday, to the whine of our neighbours drilling (or possibly sanding machine), intermittently on and off just the other side of the party wall from where I’m trying to concentrate. Possibly someone else not entirely enjoying their Bank Holiday ‘relaxation’.

Cambridge takes its examinations seriously, or at least my department does, sometimes to the despair of colleagues coming to the department who have been familiar with other perhaps less-structured systems. Exactly how seriously does depend on the particular group (especially the senior examiner who carries ultimate responsibility) setting the paper. I was once involved with a group who got more and more worked up about every comma, every semi colon, the proper use of italics and bold fonts, plus every conceivable way a question could be misinterpreted, until – as the deadline for getting the papers to be printed approached – we seemed to be meeting every other day. By that point my patience was wearing thin as I was convinced the rewording piled upon rewording,  the tweaking this way and that, merely took us back to where we’d started: we’d defined the actual basic physics of the questions many moons before. Such obsession is rare, but constant vigilance does pay off at (mainly) avoiding ambiguities. One year I got most of the way through marking a particular question, giving zero marks for what I thought was the ‘wrong’ answer. The further I worked my way down the pile of scripts, the more I realised that, although the answer was not what was intended, it was perfectly consistent with the way the question had been posed. So, back I went to the beginning with a new mark scheme, giving credit for both the expected and unanticipated responses. Rather soul destroying, and (as too often) leaving an untidy set of marks on the scripts, with many scratchings-out as I changed what I deemed was ‘correct’.

Students may be only too familiar with that moment of fear as they turn the exam paper over to see what horrors the examiners have dreamed up that year. It may surprise them to know examiners feel fear too, in case some howler has nevertheless slipped through the net. In my University we are required to turn up for the first 20 minutes of each exam, ‘appropriately’ attired in our gowns (why?), in case of problems. Thereafter we are allowed to retreat to our offices, leaving our mobile numbers behind, so that the invigilators (also be-gowned) can summon us if necessary. Rarely has that happened to me and never with anything terrible, but horror stories do abound. The year the answers were stapled onto the back of each exam paper was a classic, or the year part of a second paper got mixed in with the first. Mercifully never on my watch, because both those seem fairly irremediable failings although, strange to say, I have no recollection how either mishap was resolved – probably because people tried not to talk about the problems too loudly.

Exams have changed over the years. I was of a generation that still suffered a practical exam at the end of the first year – continuous assessment hadn’t yet found its place in the curriculum. And suffered was the operative word too. Despite having dutifully turned up to the practical classes week on week, I had very little idea of what I was doing or what I was supposed to do in that exam, with what was clearly a very open-ended experiment involving, as far as I can recall, little more than a light bulb. I have no idea why, after a year of hard work, so little expertise had sunk in or whether the fault was mine or the way we were taught.  In retrospect I am surprised it didn’t put me completely off physics forever. But then, my chemistry practical exam that year went little better, since I distinctly remember putting a glass rod through the bottom of the test-tube containing whatever precious compound I had spent several hours preparing. I suppose it’s a case of if at first you don’t succeed….

The other bizarre form of exam I remember was in my Finals, when – with a rare twist of modernity – we were allowed to do something other than simply answer questions. It felt incredibly exciting at the time (sad people that we were). We were allowed to write what these days we’d call a literature survey, actually getting a chance to read original papers. But (presumably because some Ordinance hadn’t yet been changed) we had to do it under exam conditions. So, for 3 hours, we sat and regurgitated our memories of some topic of our choosing – in my case I’d opted for something on Pseudopotentials, being fascinated by solid state physics back then. I am sure I scribbled away as fast as I could, and my writing would have been dreadful by the end of 3 hours. As an examiner I shudder when I think how hard it would have been to mark those extended essays, both because there would be no way one could devise a straightforward marking scheme, but also because the legibility must have been dubious and the reading of the essay would have been less than pleasurable I’m sure. No doubt this is what my arts colleagues endure all the time, but I am used to having more structured questions to deal with, where a mark scheme can be fairly easily devised, giving confidence in the relative reliability of the marks allocated.

So, now I must return to the grindstone. Back to that pile of papers representing a year’s worth of blood, sweat and tears, back to trying to keep a clear brain while reading multiple scripts on the same subject, back to ensuring I am consistent and fair despite a raging headache and a great desire to give up and do something more pleasurable and be anywhere else but in my untidy attic ‘office’ on this Bank Holiday.

 

Posted in Cambridge life, Education | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments