Undergraduates at Cambridge do their final exams in late May and
early June. No matter how well they have done in the rest of their three
years at Cambridge, their degree class (*) will depend entirely on
their performance during a couple of weeks right at the end of their
ninth term (or for a few who do four year degrees, their twelfth term).
You might think this would create a certain pressure and tension. You would be right. It is a very difficult period in the lives of the young people, all of whom had to do extremely well at school to get a place at Cambridge in the first place. Now their degree grade, reputation and job prospects depend on about six or seven exams of three hours each. Some subjects may substitute a dissertation for a couple of these exams.
The colleges are mostly closed to visitors during this period so it’s a bad time to visit Cambridge. Students are fretful enough without tourists taking photos of them and making distracting noises. Colleges provide advice to students on how to cope with the experience. Here is Clare College’s for example, which includes the helpful information that “It is really very hard to fail.” This is true, but depends on students working very hard in order to ensure they don’t fail, so there is something of a paradox in this advice.
It’s even worse in Oxford because students have to wear academic
dress (“sub fusc”) for exams, which means black suits or skirts, ties
and heavy black gowns, which on a hot summer day (it does sometimes
happen) in a stuffy exam room, make you feel even more hot and
oppressed. This is one tradition that Cambridge thankfully has dropped.
Oxford students voted in 2006 by a large majority against making the
wearing of sub fusc voluntary, which is I think a priori evidence for
the superior intellect of Cambridge students.
The one benefit of a period of unbearable tension is that when it finishes, the release is wonderful. Actually, the tension is released in two phases. It is a tremendous feeling to walk out of your last exam. But the actual class isn’t revealed for another few weeks, so there is still some anxiety about.
The period of celebration after exams has to wait till the very end of term, as some subjects don’t complete exams until the last day of term. The weekend after the end of term includes Suicide Sunday, supposedly named for the fact that (most) students haven’t committed suicide despite the best efforts of the University to encourage them to do so. The next week is called May Week, a week of college balls and garden parties which allows people to spend most of each day as drunk as they can handle (and in some cases drunker). It’s called May Week, despite being in June, because originally the balls were held before exams, during a time when perhaps the exams weren’t taken quite so seriously.
The exam results are posted, publicly, outside the Senate House, by subject as the results come in. So the final stage of the tension is waiting for your name to appear on a list, alongside everybody else’s, on a notice board. If you’ve done poorly, your humiliation is public. (This system of disclosure is argued by some to be in conflict with British law on data protection, as well as being needlessly insensitive, and may not last much longer.)
For the vast majority who have passed, graduation takes place a week or two later at a series of ceremonies, conducted college by college, at the Senate House. At that point students have a BA (Honours) degree from the University of Cambridge. Those lucky enough to stay alive for another three years are entitled to convert their degrees to the MA, possibly subject to a small college fee.
There is much to condemn about the Cambridge system. It puts enormous stress on students. It provides no credit for outstanding performance in the student’s first or second year. It tests students largely on their ability to perform a sort of sprint – a relatively short exam under high pressure conditions – rather than a marathon – work done steadily over a period of time, as in a dissertation. It is unavoidably open to some amount of luck, because you may have revised just the subjects that come up or you may not, you may have a cold, you have may just broken up with your loved one and so on.
But a good result cannot be faked.
(*) Cambridge, like most UK universities, places students into the following classes: First, Upper Second (II.1), Lower Second (II.2), Third (quite rare at Cambridge these days) and fail (very rare). It’s also possible to get an ordinary degree, rather than an honours degree. This is tantamount to a failure in England and Wales but a qualification in its own right in Scotland, where a fourth year brings honours.
You might think this would create a certain pressure and tension. You would be right. It is a very difficult period in the lives of the young people, all of whom had to do extremely well at school to get a place at Cambridge in the first place. Now their degree grade, reputation and job prospects depend on about six or seven exams of three hours each. Some subjects may substitute a dissertation for a couple of these exams.
The colleges are mostly closed to visitors during this period so it’s a bad time to visit Cambridge. Students are fretful enough without tourists taking photos of them and making distracting noises. Colleges provide advice to students on how to cope with the experience. Here is Clare College’s for example, which includes the helpful information that “It is really very hard to fail.” This is true, but depends on students working very hard in order to ensure they don’t fail, so there is something of a paradox in this advice.
Students suffering from stress at Trinity Hall, May 2013
The one benefit of a period of unbearable tension is that when it finishes, the release is wonderful. Actually, the tension is released in two phases. It is a tremendous feeling to walk out of your last exam. But the actual class isn’t revealed for another few weeks, so there is still some anxiety about.
The period of celebration after exams has to wait till the very end of term, as some subjects don’t complete exams until the last day of term. The weekend after the end of term includes Suicide Sunday, supposedly named for the fact that (most) students haven’t committed suicide despite the best efforts of the University to encourage them to do so. The next week is called May Week, a week of college balls and garden parties which allows people to spend most of each day as drunk as they can handle (and in some cases drunker). It’s called May Week, despite being in June, because originally the balls were held before exams, during a time when perhaps the exams weren’t taken quite so seriously.
The exam results are posted, publicly, outside the Senate House, by subject as the results come in. So the final stage of the tension is waiting for your name to appear on a list, alongside everybody else’s, on a notice board. If you’ve done poorly, your humiliation is public. (This system of disclosure is argued by some to be in conflict with British law on data protection, as well as being needlessly insensitive, and may not last much longer.)
For the vast majority who have passed, graduation takes place a week or two later at a series of ceremonies, conducted college by college, at the Senate House. At that point students have a BA (Honours) degree from the University of Cambridge. Those lucky enough to stay alive for another three years are entitled to convert their degrees to the MA, possibly subject to a small college fee.
There is much to condemn about the Cambridge system. It puts enormous stress on students. It provides no credit for outstanding performance in the student’s first or second year. It tests students largely on their ability to perform a sort of sprint – a relatively short exam under high pressure conditions – rather than a marathon – work done steadily over a period of time, as in a dissertation. It is unavoidably open to some amount of luck, because you may have revised just the subjects that come up or you may not, you may have a cold, you have may just broken up with your loved one and so on.
But a good result cannot be faked.
(*) Cambridge, like most UK universities, places students into the following classes: First, Upper Second (II.1), Lower Second (II.2), Third (quite rare at Cambridge these days) and fail (very rare). It’s also possible to get an ordinary degree, rather than an honours degree. This is tantamount to a failure in England and Wales but a qualification in its own right in Scotland, where a fourth year brings honours.
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