All in a Don's Day

by Mary Beard

  It was only a matter of time before it was picked up by the Mail, Express, Telegraph, Jeremy Vine etc. etc.

  How naive could I have been?

  There was something in this story for every journalistic prejudice. The Mail managed to combine a hit at ungrateful students (‘Students lucky enough to have won a place at Cambridge have plenty to be thankful for’), with a side-swipe at their anti-Christian sentiments (the Christian content of the traditional grace had ‘proved too much for them’). This was followed by my objections to the Latin and some sensible words from the Senior Tutor. (Barely a mention of the non-denominational traditions of the college … which was a big part of the students’ point.) The comments on the article turned out to be a very mixed bag, from those cheering the abolition of the fetters of religion (yes, in the Daily Mail) to those lamenting the decline of Christian Britain (with a good bit of student-bashing mixed in).

  The Express managed a cruder version of the above – ‘Grace is ditched before dinner …’ (no it’s not) – while the Telegraph and the Times’s Ruth Gledhill were predictably more measured, and researched. Ruth had even got Philip Howard to comment on the Latin (‘I quite like its rhetorical triptych form. Not sure that Cicero would have liked those ‘Inters’) – and on the college (‘Newnham is a college for high-minded ladies, and I dare say they want to think about peace and world poverty as well as pudding before sitting down’ – sounds a bit Laura Ashley to me.)

  All this has, of course, taken up a lot of time of the college officers, and as you can imagine, I am not exactly flavour of the month round here (though actually the publicity has been pretty good, by and large, and they had very nice pictures of the college).

  Comments

  I can′t help feeling sorry for those members of Newnham reading who happen to like wearing Laura Ashley … I understand the cliché you are working against, but you might choose not to go along with it, and rather acknowledge that young women who like floral dresses might also be serious intellectual beings with their own independent-minded take on the world.

  RICHARD

  Going to Oxford from Catholic Liverpool all those years ago, as I did, I was quite surprised to hear Latin being used by Protestants to thank the Omnipotent One for food on the table. We were told at school by the Jays not to read the Thirty-Nine Articles under any circumstances, so of course we did at the earliest opportunity. I was quite struck by the handsomeness of the English. I wonder why the ′clever men at Oxford′ didn′t produce a grace in English, which is an infinitely more beautiful language than Latin.

  ANTHONY ALCOCK

  Hold on, is it actually wrong to be thankful? I can see it being wrong to feel entitled – but thankful? ′True′ thankfulness would produce generosity … I suppose the other option is just not to eat, etc. A possibility the morally ravaged have indeed explored, to their undying ethical credit.

  Q

  Being definitely not a Christian, I still took pleasure years ago from having to recite the college grace, that being the duty of scholars by rotation, a week at a time. Long Latin periods still resonate in my inner ear. And driving to work of a morning, I pass the west front of Westminster Abbey, where an English translation of much the same text is incised in stone letters about 6 inches high. These are experiences that you cannot buy, and one somehow feels that the young are misguided in pushing them away!

  JEREMY STONE

  Exam nightmares

  12 June 2009

  I have a new exam nightmare. For the last 35 years I’ve woken up every few weeks with the same one: I’ve just gone into the exam room and it’s the wrong paper on the desk, or I’ve revised for the wrong paper, or the whole thing is written in some language I don’t understand.

  Anyway, I now have a new real-life nightmare. I don’t get to the exam room to start the exam.

  The Cambridge system is that one examiner from every ‘board’ turns up at every room in which one of their papers is to be sat – in case a student has a question, or has spotted a mistake, or whatever. Anyway I was down to turn up at the Corn Exchange on Monday morning, nine o’clock, to be there for the first thirty minutes of the Part IB Ancient History paper.

  The truth is that I completely forgot.

  It wasn’t that I was doing something fun. I was in fact at home emailing my fellow examiner about how we were to divide up, and swap, the scripts between us. I just completely forgot I should be there in the Corn Exchange, all dressed up in my gown.

  So at 9.20 a.m. (20 minutes after I should have been there) I had a call on my mobile from a member of the exam room staff, asking where I was. Actually I didn’t quite get to the mobile in time, but soon enough, another call came via the Faculty. There wasn’t a major problem, they explained. One student had had a question about the paper, but one which one of my heroic colleagues (who was there to supervise another paper) had been able to answer. But where was I, they wanted to know.

  Answer: in my dressing gown at the kitchen table. After the call, I instantly got dressed and rushed off to the exam room (borrowing the husband’s academic gown). When I got there, five minutes past the magic hour of 9.30, the chief invigilator was very nice to me (just like she is, I guess, to students who crack up or try to walk out).

  I talked to the student who had had the question, then I chatted to the invigilator about the different behaviour of different students in different subjects. (Apparently students in some subjects will take a loo/fag break between every question they answer …)

  Then I got on my bike to go back to the office to wait for the scripts to be delivered (70 overall), and I’ve been marking ever since.

  I live to fight another day, I think.

  How do examiners mark exams?

  15 June 2009

  I wouldn’t want to claim that exams are as bad for the markers as they are for the sitters. But the Cambridge Tripos is still a big investment of time and hard work for the dons. It’s not just that you have to read each paper carefully (and I have spent more or less the whole of the last week on this, more than 12 hours a day). You have also to decide what principle of marking to adopt.

  Put simply, if you are dealing with standard ‘essay’ papers, you can either go question by question (that is, mark all the answers to question 1, then all the answers to question 2 and so on) – or you can go candidate by candidate (that is, mark all the answers from candidate A, then move on to candidate B and so on).

  The advantage of the former is that you can compare the answers more directly and see more easily which candidates have got new or more interesting material.

  About 20 years ago I was marking a set of Ancient History scripts in which the first candidate I marked referred to an anecdote about the fruit trees of the Athenian fifth-century politician Cimon. I was impressed. But when I discovered that at least 20 of the first 30 candidates had the same anecdote, I realised that it must have been banged on about in lectures.

  The advantage of the candidate-by-candidate approach is that you can see the profile of an individual student’s answer much more easily.

  Over the years, I’ve developed a (time-consuming) compromise between the two. A rod for my own back, but fair to the students I think.

  First of all I go through the papers, question by question. Then I go back to take a second look, candidate by candidate. I read each script quickly again, this time thinking of the overall performance of the individual student.

  It is very time-consuming, but at least I can look the students in the eye. And that seems to me the basic principle of old-fashioned examining. There are all kinds of brutalities about it, but if you can face the candidate and feel OK about explaining why they got what they did – that’s good enough for me.

  Anyway what was I marking this year? Technically, I think I am not supposed to say. We are a communal board of examiners and take communal responsibility. But it wouldn’t take long to guess that I have been marking Ancient History in Part IB (taken by most of our students at th
e end of their second year) – and indeed I have confessed so already.

  These were the questions: two sections, three questions to be answered in three hours, one from each section. (I should say that these relate to the pre-defined syllabus of ‘Paper 7’ … this wasn’t just a random set of questions.)

  Section A

  1. Was Demosthenes right to say that King Philip of Macedon was a threat to Greece?

  2. ‘The individual was the only thing that mattered.’ Is this true of Greek politics and society in the fourth century BC?

  3. Was the fourth-century Athenian Confederacy simply an imitation of the Athenian Empire in the fifth century?

  4. Imagine you are a Roman senator in the reign of Hadrian. What would you see as the personal advantages and disadvantages of taking the governorship of the province of Asia?

  5. ‘Greek culture was more or less unaffected by Roman rule in the East.’ Is this true?

  6. How coercive was Roman rule in the Eastern provinces?

  7. ‘Religion at Rome was, in essence, a branch of politics – there was no such thing as private religious devotion as we know it.’ Argue against this proposition.

  8. Why did some Rome emperors punish Christians?

  9. ‘Goodness gracious me, I think I’m turning into a god’ (Vespasian, on his death-bed). Can you explain why Romans took the deification of their emperors seriously?

  Section B

  10. Is all history writing about the present as much as about the past? (Answer with reference to at least two Greek or Roman historians.)

  11. ‘Exile makes good historians.’ Is this true of Greek historians? Why?

  12. Do Cicero’s letters help us to understand his ‘real’ feelings and motivations?

  13. ‘Inscribed documents are particularly valuable because, unlike literary texts, they are free from bias.’ Discuss.

  14. ‘It is very rare that a individual inscription has made much of a difference to our understanding of any aspect of Greek or Roman history.’ Is this too gloomy an assessment of the value of epigraphy?

  15. Can you ever reach a good understanding of an inscription without knowing its physical context and setting?

  Remember: this exam is sat not by finalists, but by students at the end of their second year of a Classics degree (or, for those without Latin or Greek A level, at the end of their third year).

  What do you think?

  Comments

  O please, Prof., don′t tease …

  What was the Cimon fruit tree anecdote? I didn′t find it in the Wiki article (though I am now close to examining the lower half of the wine bottle – maybe I missed it?)

  Indulge, do, just once, a lazy student …

  PETER ADAMS

  … aaah the Fruit Trees. As I remember it, the question was ‘Unlike Rome, Classical Athens had no such thing as a system of patronage between rich and poor′ … or something like that, but rather better expressed. The anecdote, again as I remember from Plutarch′s Life of Cimon (I′m doing this without looking up!), said that Cimon used to keep his gardens open so that people could come and pick the fruit from his trees. Almost every damn candidate came out with this story and said (as I assume Dr Millett had in his lectures) that this was a passive form of patronage.

  MARY BEARD

  When I mark stuff, I usually divvy up the examinees into safe bets, teeterers and awkward buggers. I go through the safe bets to get an idea of the ‘standard′ and to allow for historical deviations, so to speak. Then I give the teeterers a real going-over and put the worst ones aside with a tentative plus or minus. Then I spend most of my time on the awkward buggers. The ones who bend the rules but might be right to do so. Or just plain twisted. Then back to the teeterers, who often seem a lot more rational and amenable after the awkward buggers. Then maybe back to the safe bets for a quick check if I′ve got time.

  I′ve found that it usually takes about a paragraph or two to gauge the general standard of a candidate. And most are consistent. It′s the inconsistent ones that bother me. And the consistently schizophrenic – the quintessential teeterers – the ones who write nice sentences (often a good sign), frinstance, but have little to say although they′re often good at disguising this – having often learned the skill from their lecturers ;-). Or the less common wild and woolly writers who actually know what they′re on about, but go barefoot to lectures and eat raw cabbage in the street (though these are usually the awkward buggers).

  XJY

  Wasn′t it Arthur Lionel Smith – historian, Classicist, Master of Balliol – who got his wife to read scripts, interrupted by his calls for her to ‘skip! skip!′ once he thought he′d heard enough to judge each candidate?

  These days examiners are required to complete a sheet for each script, outlining the reasons for the marks allocated. I′ve never heard of spouses helping.

  DAVID MARTIN

  This is my sort of advice for essay-writers: DO WRITE: ‘Umberto Eco has argued that … ′, ′This makes me think that … ′, ′You will understand it better if you know the mythology′ and ′Odysseus is crafty′ DON′T WRITE: ′It has been argued that … ′, ′Therefore it can be said that … ′, ′An understanding of the mythology is of benefit to the reader′ and ′Thus it can be seen that the quality of craftiness could, to a certain extent, be applied at times to the character of Odysseus′.

  MICHAEL BULLEY

  I had a first-year student write to me once claiming to have been told at school that one ought, in essays, to preface statements with ′It might be argued that … ′ or similar, and asking whether one ought to do the same at university. I suspect that this does sometimes happen, and explains why students sometimes write the equivalent of ′it could be argued that an elephant is larger than a mouse.

  RICHARD

  There was actually a certain amount of culture shock involved in transferring from the English regime of weekly-essay-and-tutorial to the large lecture classes of a vast Middle Western campus a few years later. My first lecture class was on the Roman Republic and my TA a graduate student with a shiny new BA from a cut-glass women′s college on the East Coast. I said to her that I had no idea how much the 80-odd students in the lecture class were taking in. ′That′s easy′, she said, ′set a pop quiz′ The morning I announced this was the nadir of my popularity as a lecturer. Fortunately one student saw the funny side. One of the questions was ′Who taught the Romans to foretell the future from the entrails of birds?′ (expecting the answer ′The Etruscans′). The most memorable answer was ′Colonel Sanders′. My apologies if I have told this story before.

  OLIVER NICHOLSON

  An anecdote about Leofranc Holford-Strevens, now Classics editor at the OUP and a distinguished writer on ancient literature. Faced with an exam question whose rubric said, ′Translate the following … ′, he elected to translate it into Serbo-Croat. There was no one in Oxford who could mark it, but they found someone at the University of London, who awarded an alpha. Since then, the rubric has read, ′Translate the following into English. I suggest that someone now try a translation into Geordie English and see what happens.

  The other concerns a student who spent the entire three hours on one question. He was given an alpha/gamma, and the alpha on the viva voce. Well, try it, chaps.

  PAUL POTTS

  I can answer A4.

  a. Trousers haven′t been invented.

  b. Chesters Fort is freezing.

  STEVE THE NEIGHBOUR

  Graduation: no animals killed

  29 June 2009

  Our students graduated on Saturday. In Cambridge graduation lasts three days, from Thursday till Saturday. They go to pick up their degrees by college, in order of the date of foundation of the college (which means that Newnham, in 1871, comes at the beginning of the last day).

  I never go to the ceremony itself. In fact I have never been to a graduation ceremony at all, not even my own – for any of my degrees (I just got the certificate through the post, in absentia a
s the phrase is). When I was first graduating with my BA, I just couldn’t face all the rituals – the dressing up in the fur-lined hood, the clasping the fingers of the ‘praelector’, the Latin and the hand-clasping with the vice-chancellor (or the VC’s deputy – the top dog understandably doesn’t sit in the Senate House for three days presiding over this).

  I also couldn’t face organising the whole show for a pair of divorced parents (they weren’t technically divorced, as it turned out – my Dad had lost interest in the whole proceedings after the decree nisi and had never bothered to apply for the decree absolute, despite reminders from his solicitors … but they were divorced in spirit). I told both of them a real whopper: graduation wasn’t any longer what most people did, it was just for the blazer brigade.

  It is now one of my biggest regrets. At the cost of a little embarrassment to MB and some deft negotiation of parental squabbling, I could have given them a really proud and memorable day. So now when any student says to me that they don’t fancy it, I try my hardest to persuade them to go through with it.

  And I always try to go to the party that Newnham lays on for every one after the ceremony itself.

  It is, I guess, much as it always has been – loads of young women in fur-lined hoods, loads of beaming mums and dads (who have a capacity to be delighted even when the offspring didn’t do quite as well as they might secretly have hoped) and lashings of bubbly. (Don’t tell the Telegraph: I’m pretty sure the students pay anyway!) My pleasant job – and it really is fun – is to track down my students and to meet their parents, usually for the first time.

  Only once in 25 years has any parent complained about anything. They are mostly very grateful and impressed for what we offer (especially for the personal attention that senior academics give to their daughters) – and they are only too happy to share unbloggable insights into their offspring, which one is glad one hadn’t known before!