Sphinx

It’s widely recognised – at least among education professionals – that national debates around are unhelpfully shaped by anecdata, the extrapolation of personal experience into broader principles and the legitimation of such principles through lived experience. It’s the “I was beaten regularly and it made me the man I am today” approach to discipline, the “grammar school allowed me to escape my deprived upbringing so it must be best for everyone” policy, the “I learnt my times table and lots of dates so obviously it’s the lack of those that explains The Problem With Youth Today” school of curriculum reform. It’s a major source, if not the major source, of the nostalgia for the days when university was a minority privilege that pervades discussions such as this morning’s fuss about too many Undeserving People getting Inflated Grades, spoon-fed snowflakes and lax standards, nothing wrong with a Desmond ha ha in my day.

Better, let alone different, always actually means worse. Because of course it can’t be that today’s students actually work harder and more effectively, or that modern teaching methods and approaches are more appropriate and successful. Because even if that doesn’t call our own credentials into question – still more, our sense of what those credentials mean – then it would certainly establish that our experience, and our sense of what an education is, isn’t universally and eternally valid. And on what basis would politicians and their enablers then be able to develop educational policy, without having to listen to those whiny and inconvenient experts?

This isn’t to claim that practitioners and experts are in no way ever affected by our own experiences; but the more students you engage with, the harder it becomes to assume that a one-size-fits-all experience exists (especially if you spend time in different sorts of universities with different sorts of intake). Still more, it puts one’s own experience in a different light to see how things actually work, rather than just accepting the end result as the output of an inscrutable, infallible and certainly irreproachable black box. Now, I should say that, never having been an examiner in the Cambridge system, I still don’t have more than a fuzzy idea of how the hell I ended up with the degree class that put me on track for PhD funding, and quite possibly things have changed substantially since then – but comparing then and now gives me a powerful sense of how todays’s students are being properly helped to realise their potential, and how much I’m driven by a wish to give them a better (or at least less confused) experience than I had.

End of the second year. My current students have a clear sense of where they stand, knowing the grades that will count for a third of their final degree, and so having a good idea of how they’ll need to perform in the final year – which maybe leads some of them to slacken off, or gives a false sense of security, but on the whole I doubt it. More importantly, they’ve been given detailed information about what they need to do to maintain the standard or improve, in different forms of assessment – and the possibility of choosing between final-year courses offering different sorts of assessment, if it’s clear that they’re better at coursework than exams.

I, on the other hand, have had lots of practice in hacking out a more or less plausible argument at short notice on the basis of limited reading, with little sense of whether the essays were any good or not – which doesn’t really matter because they don’t count for anything. Sum total of feedback on second-year performance, after the exams (which also don’t count towards the final degree): “that’s all fine” from my tutor, and the passing comment from the wonderful Rosamond McKitterick, who’d supervised me for early medieval European history, that “you could be capable of getting a first if you applied yourself”. Other than just reading more, and spending less time on other things, I’m not entirely sure what this should involve.

On to the final year. My students have written essays and source analyses, they’ve developed extended research projects, they’ve given presentations in mini conferences, and some have even done exams; and all along they’ve been given guidance on what they’re expected to do, and feedback on how they’ve done – and for one module, the key part of the assessment is how they make use of that feedback for the revised submission. Spoon-feeding? Hardly, unless you think that the only valid learning is via random osmosis, picking up a sense of how to produce a proper academic analysis by reading other people’s, without any explicit guidance – and that doesn’t matter anyway because the only assessments that count are four unseen exams, for some of which you haven’t actually been prepared properly so the questions all seem rather random…

I’m not going to say that I didn’t deserve my degree, just that it certainly involved a considerable amount of luck – some of which went my way, some didn’t, so perhaps we’re even – and possibly (I can’t know, but suspect) the sort of judgement that we don’t use any more, that I seemed on balance like a first-class sort of chap. Some of my students today would probably have done just as well under that system, others not – and the crucial point is that this would not be a reflection of their overall abilities, but of a specific subset of them, and a lot of luck. And both categories would accept this as an objective judgement of their qualities, when that might not be true in either case.

Would I get a first under the current system? Probably (it’s never a certainty, and my somewhat wayward second year would count against me). But – and this is where the counterfactual gets ever more abstract – not on the basis of the sort of work I actually produced back then*, but on the basis of the kind of work I’d have been capable of producing with more guidance and more detailed feedback, with the sort of support and guidance I’d get today. And two further things follow from that. Firstly, whatever the result, I’d have known pretty well why I got it, rather than just being presented with on oracular judgement. Secondly, whatever the result, I’d have been vastly better prepared for research, or indeed for more or less anything else besides hacking out plausible essays and improvising arguments under exam conditions.

I remain entirely unconvinced by the whole system of degree classification – the step change between classes, and the baroque rules for classification, are simply absurd. But I feel pretty confident that, on average, today’s degree results are more meaningful than those of thirty years ago, insofar as the system is transparent (albeit baroque) and judgements are based on more than just “X had a couple of good days”. There are doubtless other influences on changing patterns of grades (yes, I instinctively blanch at the idea of 40% firsts…) – but the fact that we actually attempt to teach students and assess them on their skills as well as their luck and short-term memory is certainly a major factor.

*I can easily imagine the sort of feedback I’d have given myself: “Some interesting and original ideas, and a plausible line of argument, but you need to develop your points in more depth and support them with evidence. You must read more widely, and spend more time planning the structure; clearly written, but referencing is non-existent. 58”