An unnecessary exam
There’s a furore over Mods exam scripts in the humanities division of the university. A number of undergraduates, expressing themselves mainly through the History Assembly and English JCC, want greater feedback about their Mods results. Since examiners’ comment sheets are both infamously illegible and routinely destroyed after being finished with, this leaves us with a couple of options.
First, examiners could be made to produce detailed reports on each paper taken for each candidate (a system somewhat similar to feedback for graduate Library papers). Assuming, conservatively, half an hour per report, this would equate to approximately 550 hours extra work for the examiners in English Mods alone. The university would be (justifiably) reluctant to plump for this. Second, exam scripts could be returned, without the accompanying mark sheets, to candidates.
Those who got less than they were expected to, or less than they felt they deserved, would be able to read exactly what they wrote (rather than relying on a hazy examcelebration- addled memory) and might be able to work out from there where things went wrong, possibly taking up tutorial time to do so. That’s the principle, but realistically it’s hard to see how having scripts without comments, or vice versa, could help students at all.
Unfortunately for those keen on such an idea, exam scripts become the property of the board of examiners after they are written and thus any movement for the return of scripts must convince the proctors to give them up. Which is unlikely to happen with lightning speed - these issues have been discussed at length at both the English Joint Consultative Committee and Faculty Board while I was a member and have now been taken to the Divisional Board by our close friends, the historians.
The Divisional Board, if they feel they want to pursue this, will take it to the proctors and perhaps to University Council itself. The nature of the university, steeped in bureaucracy and slow to change, means that the student body has to be careful to pick battles • pursuing transparency in Mods marking seems to be an uphill struggle for a reward of dubious utility.
The last thing that I would have wanted to do at the beginning of my Final Honours course would have been to spend the first three weeks agonising over where it all went wrong. The majority of students just want to put the experience behind them, and tutors are unlikely to want to force a rehash of the exams on them. Fellows, after all, want to teach, not to spend their tutorials commiserating. Perhaps it is better to assume where we went wrong, and then get on with our lives.
Having convinced myself that my woeful performance in the Introduction to Critical Theory Paper was the result of a third of it being on philosophy rather than anything directly relating to literature, I really don’t want to find out that it was actually because of a particularly unintelligent essay on Marxist literary theory. Or whatever. Mods results are not, actually, worth the time to worry about.
It is fairly generally accepted that the exams are just hoops to jump through, so the sum utility of making these changes are as follows: £75 for the top result in the year for most papers and a slightly increased chance of a College Scholarship if you get a distinction. This equates to approximately one night on the piss once you’ve taken into account the cost of your scholar’s gown. Apart from that, Mods count for nothing.
They are often used as an indication of what Final class one might end up in, but are in reality totally unrelated. Obviously, those who do well in Mods often do well in Finals, but this is correlation rather than cause: those who don’t do as well as expected in Mods won’t necessarily do worse than expected in Finals. It’s the actual final exams that count, and the chance to look at an unmarked Mods script isn’t going to do anything but sate one’s curiosity, somewhat.
Better to spend our time studying rather than worrying about what might have been in a round of exams that mean nothing. After all, we’re all here to learn; exam performance ought to be secondary to that.
9th Feb 2006