As of Friday, my exams are officially over. I had two double exams, one for incompressible flow (3A1) and one for compressible flow (3A3), each covering a full year's worth of course material in three hours. The experience was a little nerve-wracking, even though my exams don't officially count for anything since I'm not getting a Cambridge degree after this year.
While I was at Rice, I spent three years serving on the Honor Council and I knew that we were very lucky to have policies that allowed students to have take home and unproctored exams. But it's difficult to appreciate how special this type of Honor System is until you've taken exams under the complete opposite conditions. I can now say with certainty that even with my heavy involvement with the Honor Council, I didn't fully appreciate the luxury of the Honor System until this past week when I took exams at Cambridge.
Sure the exams themselves were tough. Very tough, in fact. And unfortunately the authors of the incompressible flow exam didn't seem to agree with me on which topics were the most relevant (i.e. exam-worthy). Going into the exam I was pretty confident I could do well as long as no questions on the law of the wall for turbulent boundary layers or the horseshoe vortex method for modeling flows over aircraft wings popped up. There was plenty of other material to test, but as luck would have it, both topics showed up. Oops.
Ok, so the exam was challenging, and my study strategy didn't pan out the way I'd hoped. But those things paled in comparison to the stressful conditions under which students in Cambridge are expected to take exams. During my first exam, one poor guy fainted and fell out of his chair. The proctor had to stop the exam while he called an ambulance to take the kid away. During the thirty minutes when the exam was "stopped" (i.e. we weren't allowed to write anything or look through the questions), we all had to sit there quietly, wondering what happened to this poor guy, and try not to let the incident rattle our nerves. Easier said than done.
But, fortunately for us (and I say this with utmost facetiousness), the proctor informed us just before he re-started the exam that he had assessed the situation and found it appropriate to award us all an extra five minutes of time to spend on the exam, due to the fact that the incident had probably interrupted our flow of thought. Wow, how kind. Just leaves me wondering whether we would have gotten ten minutes if there had been blood involved?
The second exam went considerably better. I felt very confident about my answers to four of the questions, and even though my answer to the fifth one was sketchy at best, I at least thought the test was a fair sample of the main concepts we had covered. Also, no one keeled over in the middle of it, which was a definite plus.
So what makes Cambridge exams so stressful, you ask? Several things, and here are a few that I can think of off the top of my head.
- There are no exams all year until the end, when they are all piled on at once. One term's worth of material is assessed in an hour and a half, and there's no real way to determine which topics will show up on the exam. This makes studying feel a little bit like playing Russian roulette.
- The atmosphere in the exam hall is very tense. Everyone waits anxiously outside the exam hall for a while before being allowed in. Feels a bit like cattle being herded into the slaughterhouse. You take exams in a big exam hall where you are assigned a desk and have to leave all your belongings outside.
- There is no trust. You have to bring and display your ID card next to your desk tag to prove that you're the one who's supposed to be taking the exam. Gown-clad proctors literally walk up and down the aisles looking over your shoulder for the entire duration of the exam. If you need to use the bathroom, you have to raise your hand and be escorted there and back by a proctor. After the exam is over, you are not allowed to take any scrap work with you, and you have to have your desk and paper "checked" by a proctor before you can leave the room.
- Students are in direct competition with one another for good grades. This is sort of true everywhere, but here it seems to be taken to the extreme. There are no grading scales (i.e. 90% = A, 80% = B, etc), and all the exams are scaled at the end to give a certain percentage of firsts, two-ones, two-twos, and thirds (the various degree classifications here). So, even if you did very well on an exam, you could end up with a third if all your classmates did just slightly better than you. There is also no transparency in this scaling process, and (I may be wrong about this), I don't think students ever get to see their exams after they've been marked.
I realize that exams are probably similar to this in many many places, and that Rice is extremely special in allowing students to have such freedom in their exams, but it was still a bit of a shock to me how formal the whole process is. I was discussing Rice's Honor System with a classmate on the way back from my second exam, and his comment was, "Doesn't everyone just cheat?" Yes, some people do, and sitting on the Honor Council let me see the cases of the unfortunate ones who got caught. But on the whole, I truly think the system is very well respected and that the percentage of students who cheat is small.
This got me thinking a lot about whether or not an Honor System would work in Cambridge. And my conclusion is that because of the way degrees are classed (i.e. putting students in direct competition with one another for grades) and the way that exams are all administered within a short timeframe, an Honor System could fail miserably here. I don't believe that Cambridge students are any less honorable than Rice students, but I do sense that there would be a feeling of "well everyone else is probably cheating while taking their exams at home, so I'd better cheat too, just to keep up with the competition."
Maybe I'm totally wrong about it all; it's mostly speculation, and I suppose there's no way to know for sure. But what I do know with absolute certainty is that I have a new-found appreciation for Honor Systems like the one at Rice. After all, it is really nice just to trust and be trusted in return.
-lmc
[edit 23 May 2009]: A friend of mine who was on the CD Broad exchange from Trinity to Rice a few years ago has pointed out a few corrections I'd like to note here. There is a fixed system that sets percentages for getting a first, two-one, two-two, and third degree, although the scaling process is still a bit of a mystery to me. Also the number of people getting each type of degree classification can vary from year to year depending on the quality of work submitted, so I guess it's less of a direct competition between students than I had first assumed. In any case, it's certainly true that the exam system here is much different from the one at Rice, and each system has its own benefits. There's a reason why a Cambridge degree means so much, and I'm sure part of it has to do with the grueling exams that students have to take.
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