On the day in 1986 that our university degree results were due to be posted (I mean actually pinned-up on a noticeboard outside the admin office) my then partner showed some surprise when I said I would stay at home and try and write. Later in the day she telephoned to say I’d got a First and that she and a close friend of mine had been hugging and jumping for joy on my behalf. Later she told me I had sounded cold and unemotional on the phone, that there was something odd about my reaction. I couldn’t explain my feelings to her because it would have sounded cruel. But what I had been thinking about was the difference between explanation and understanding - she’d rung me up to tell me something I already knew!
How could I know? I should say at the outset that there were no ethical problems, no one leaked anything, spoke out of turn or acted ‘inappropriately’.
In those days the lecturers hoped that each year, out of a cohort of about 30 students, there would be a First - but would not be put-out if there wasn’t. In exceptional years there might be two. I’m prompted to write this because this year, 2017, the media are reporting that up to 40% have achieved a First on some courses. University places have tripled since I took my degree. Assuming that variation in intelligence stays roughly the same in any yearly cohort, then that represents both massive ‘grade inflation’ and a huge drop in standards. I considered myself lucky to go to university aged 24, I was allowed in as a result of both work experience and educational qualifications – I had nothing like the grades of the 18 year old’s around me!
Over the three years I picked-up from staff and other students a sense of what ‘classes’ of degrees meant. Whilst a single piece of work might be given a percentage or a grade to reflect its quality, such a score might disguise as much as it illuminated. The same mark might be given to someone who was excellent at basic tasks, as was given to someone who had done well at something more challenging, but who had neglected something more fundamental. Classes of degree were meant to reflect a body of work where several levels had been achieved, each building on each other, but which could not be achieved by neglecting any one part of it.
The largest difference was between a 2.1 and a First. Then as now, the ‘knowledge base’ in the social sciences was ‘highly contested’. So, if you wrote an essay in good English which demonstrated an understanding of the question, contrasted the main approaches (probably three) taken by the leading researchers on the particular subject in the question and could point out the relative strengths and weakness of each, you ought to get a 2.1. But you wouldn’t even be considered for a First. For that you needed an argument of your own, but which was nonetheless grounded somewhere in the evidence offered on the recommended reading list. Then you had to make a convincing case - conviction alone was never enough.
‘Don’t bother trying to get a First’, people would say. Advice that was kindly meant, since so much of the final mark was based on coursework as well as exams spread over two years. It’s one thing to write the occasional great piece, but to average those kinds of marks! But I just had so much to say in my own voice that I must have quite unconsciously announced an intention simply by the way I started to write from the beginning of my second year!
‘Everything is decided at the External Examiner’s meeting’, we were told. Well I knew his name (a Professor from a university with a better reputation in the subject than ours), but I was not encouraged. I’d read very little of his work, about a page and half I think. Very theoretical, difficult. (And that’s coming from someone who was sort-out by fellow student’s to explain, ‘in simple terms’ what a lot of sociological theory was about.) In retrospect I was probably wrong, he may well have been sympathetic to what I was, at least, trying to do.
At about 12 o’clock on the day of the meeting I collided with our ‘director of studies’ at the coffee machine: ‘We’ve been talking about you all morning’, he said in an accusing manner, ‘and I’ve got to go back in for more!’ Very sensibly he was taking a comfort break - he’d had a physical disability for many years and really needed to keep on the move as much as possible. But it was then that I knew I’d got it, when he implied they were still talking about me.
Now the only reason they’d be talking so much about me rather than anyone else, was if I was the borderline case between a 2.1 and a First (the rank order having been easily decided.) But then I knew that already. My coursework marks indicated a strong First, my exam results a middling 2.1. In those days it was quite easy to keep track of your coursework marks over two years, plus the overall mark for a particular module, know the ‘weighting’ towards the final degree – the exam mark was simply the difference. I knew that my marks gave me a 2.1, but that my lecturers thought of me as a First. Well most of them!
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| (photo by Nick Hewling) |
So the results were posted a couple of days later, and my partner and I trotted off to the annual end of year party hosted by one of her lecturers, someone who had not taught me. ‘We were actually made to sit there and read your essays!’ This from a psychologist forced to read sociology. She then turned to her new boyfriend (a Reader in Archaeology from the university two stops up the railway line), ‘Darling, how did you react when they told you you’d got a First?’ ‘I cried’, was his only reaction.
A week or so later I went to talk to one of the lecturers from the School of Management who had taught me. I went seeking advice on my PhD. All he wanted to talk about was the Examiner’s meeting. (I’d written one of my better efforts for him - on the role of the State during the Miner’s Strike 1984-1985, undertaken whilst the dispute was still going on.) ‘It was us who got you your First ..They didn’t want to give it to you [the sociologists] ..We told them they were setting the standard too high ..Then we just sat there...’ He went on to explain that the sociologists had started from the position of wanting to it give it to me, then began finding reasons not to, he and his colleague hadn’t said much, just waited for the tide to turn.
There was some rivalry between the School of Management and Social Sciences, the former believing they had a stronger footing in the real world (relatively speaking); the later, the better academic credentials. But the teaching was divided for my particular degree – Sociology with Industrial Relations. (As for the PhD, I only completed a year - but that’s another story.)
See also: Lost in a 'can't-do' culture!
