 |
| Academic dress: your examiner might look like this... Photo by Matthias Rosenkranz |
This term, I’ve been invigilating
Oxford History Finals for the first time. Invigilating isn’t perhaps the right
word – the setting up, distribution of papers, handing out of booklets
and general military-precision oversight is carried out by the Examination
Schools staff. Academics attend in the role of ‘examiners’: if you sit on a
Finals Exam Board for your subject, you have to don full academic dress and be
present for the first half hour of an examination. Examiners stand at the front
of the hall, and are there in order to answer any queries which might arise
about the academic content of the papers. Half an hour in, they process out of
the examination hall in semi-stately procession (clutching mortar boards,
rucksacks, cycle helmets), and leave everyone else to it for another 2.5 hours.
I’ve found invigilating a deeply
strange experience. This is in part because I haven’t witnessed a formal, large-scale University examination since I sat my
own Finals, over 15 years ago. But it was also strange because the contrast
between the Victorian world of the Exam Schools and the busy world outside
seems to have become sharper; the dissonance has grown.
Oxford is famed for the formality
of its exams. Students have to arrive in ‘sub fusc’ academic dress, or else
they are ineligible to sit their papers. Tourists are keen to take photos of
students in their gowns, black ribbons and carnations, or of examiners in their
billowing red hoods. Exams here are highly ritualised, and perhaps fetishized.
The papers the students sit are still a gold standard, in terms of academic
rigour and challenge. The contents of the papers reflect the very latest trends
in scholarship and research. Yet the external trappings of our exams culture
are very obviously Victorian, and from another era: the vast 19C Examination Schools designed by Thomas Jackson (‘an exam palace’, as a Polish visitor once
described it), the archaising dress, and 300 students sat writing by hand for 3 hours at a time. This scene feels rather weirder to me now
than it did in the 1990s; in a world of digital, ubiquitous and increasingly
socially penetrating technology, the frozen-in-time staging of Oxford exams risks
looking anachronistic, and bizarre rather than quaintly traditional. I have a
lot of affection for these Oxford traditions, but I do wonder if – when
invigilating in, say, 2019 – I will, dressed in black gown and red hood, be
surveying a room full of laptops, rather than pale students clutching fountain pens.
