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    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 oneof 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