UNDERGRADUATE PAGE

Tri pos Blues

By -LAURENCE ADKINS (Downing College, Cambridge) BOUT this time each year the greater part of the eighty thousand-odd undergraduate population of the country is either taking examinations, about to take them, or just finished with them, and suffering in consequence * the attendant nervous strain. At Cambridge, where seven thousand students live

together in the university as a community, working in close contact with one another, the strain can best be compared with that felt by an army battalion about to move up to the front line. There is tension of the same quality, if not of the same degree, the same brave face, the same moments of sudden panic when it seems impossible to continue working, to cover the necessary work in time, to continue living even, and there are the same feeble jokes. Inevitably casualties occur, while the problems raised by such a mass state of nervous tension are enormous.

It has become a tragic commonplace that each year one, two, or more, students will commit suicide. On the Tuesday of the first week of examinations at Cambridge this year an Indian student l'as found gassed in his rooms. At the inquest it appeared that worry over his family in India, caught in the trouble at Hyderabad, was the more likely cause of his suicide, and that the fact that he was taking an examination was, in the words of the coroner. " only coincidence perhaps." Nevertheless general opinion before the inquest undoubtedly assumed that the strain of examinations had been the cause. More significantly, that one suicide started a whole crop of rumours, and by Friday morning rumour had it that altogether four students had killed themselves. Fortunately there was no foundation for such fears, but the very fact that such scare- mongering could flourish indicates the considerable strain under which the whole university approaches examinations.

This strain and anxiety create a serious problem in any univer- sity. The Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, Dr. John Lowe, declared recently at Bristol University that the suicide rate was relatively higher among university students than among other groups and was rising, while he also observed that there was an increasing tendency among students to worry themselves into " anxiety states." Not everyone agrees with him, and among those that do there are differences of opinion as to the causes. Some will say that the undergraduates of to-day are more concerned about the future ; others that they have to rely more on their own work ; and others that students are merely suffering from tripos blues.

That Cambridge was tackling this problem of "anxiety states" was made evident at the beginning of the Easter Term, when the Council of the Senate issued a warning that it would no longer be possible to obtain aegrotat degrees after a nervous breakdown. The decision was taken after consultation with Cambridge physicians with large undergraduate practices, and also on the advice of two eminent London consultants, one a neurologist and the other a psychiatrist. It was agreed that the knowledge that an aegrotat degree could be obtained tended in certain cases to induce a nervous breakdown without physical cause. There is no doubt that the decision was made in the best interests of all undergraduates and was in many ways eminently sound, yet to some the decision seemed based on the old maxim that the best way to make a child swim was to throw him into the water, and certainly, it was argued, did not tackle the fundamental problems and danger;- created by the present examination system. The last few weeks before the examinations are occupied with frantic revistqn and painful attempts to memorise a vast amount of knowledge. The legendary midnight oil is burnt, and one student was heard to burst forth from this nocturnal vigil with the despairing cry: " I can't remember my own name even." A friend of mine, discovering the night before that he had read none of his set texts of critical authors, took a gamble, chose one, and learnt by heart a model four-page answer. " If it doesn't come up I'm sunk," he muttered the next morning at breakfast. In the examination room, before everyone had settled down even, he was seen furiously unloading what he had learnt. Whether it had any relevance to the

question, or not, did not matter: he just had to write what he had to say before he could look at the rest of the paper. Certainly most, if pot all, of this information learnt by rote is forgotten immediately it has served its purpose, and one wonders of what value it is to ex-amine it.

A gambler's instinct appears, too, to be a useful attribute. One afternoon spent in the college library in a thorough investigation of past examination papers can convince the astute student that

certain questions are likely winners, and accordingly he fully primes himself with what he considers " red hot certs." The conversation

therefore after an examination—" I came down on two of my bankers "—might easily have taken place on a Saturday evening in the local during a discussion of the football pools instead.

Few will believe that such attitudes are healthy or desirable— it is certainly not what the examiner wants—and many supervisors are at pains during the last few weeks to build up the morale of their students so that they can answer freely on any subject, sub- divisions and permutations of sub-divisions of subject, which may arise. Examination technique and facility of expression are more rewarding than painstaking memorising and merely fortuitous question-spotting, and as the examination system stands at present it is by far the best approach.

But even this sound method is likely- to be defeated in the examination room, perhaps by the type of question, and certainly by the sheer physical impossibitity'of writing five intelligent answers on widely different subjects, working, as one has to, against the clock. A question in the recent English Tripos was formulated in

this way: " ' The novel provides above all a means of portraying and exploring human relationships.' Discuss with reference to one

of the following: George Eliot, George Meredith, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, L. H. Myers." For the student seriously interested in English literature and the signifi- cance of the novel his reaction is one of delight at the opportunity of answering an intelligent question, yet after fifteen minutes in an examination room, when he finds he has only begun to scratch the surface of the problem, which in fact needs much more than the

whole of the allotted time to discuss properly, his delight turns to anger and frustration, and finally to confusion as he scrambles to

cram everything into a thirty-minute answer. The result is neither a credit to him nor of interest to the examiner. Indeed, faced with the appalling number of papers written under such pressure, which he has to mark, it is surprising that the examiner, and not the student, does not commit suicide.

It is, of course, agreed that some assessment of work and capa- bility is necessary, but many students would prefer to see a degree awarded on the standard of work during the year, or two years, spent in the study of one's own particular subject. In English literature for instance—and I only speak for my own subject—a certain number of essays could be set on specific questions through- out the two years. These could be concerned with topics central to the study of English literature, while their length could be limited to so many thousand words. It would be necessary also at the end of the two years' course of study to consider an original composition on a question of the student's own choice, while if any test under examination conditions was thought valuable it should be limited to an essay on a general or literary topic, and to papers which assess solely the student's intelligence, critical sensibility and general background knowledge when presented with the text of certain poems or passages from novels to consider and appraise.

Such, or similar, proposals have been made before in greater detail than this simple sketch, but unfortunately their proposers have too often been looked upon as unorthodox and experimental in the pejorative sense. To many others, however, such schemes seem sensible and long overdue, and eventually the suitability of an undergraduate for an honours degree must surely be decided by some morejntelligent and humane method than the present system- Assessment of study and work- carried out without the stress of examinations is likely in the end to show a gfeater consistency and a higher standard of scholarship and academic qualification. Certainly it would ensure that a degree was a real indication of an undergraduate's intelligence and ability, and not, as it so nearly becomes now, a campaign medal.