Cormac Shine | Editor-at-large
“Should intellectuals tweet?”
To be honest, I’ve never really worried too much about the ethical implications of Alain de Botton or Bernard-Henri Lévy’s activities on the 140-character platform. But that may an issue that future Senior Freshman students will have to face. It’s a sample of what might appear in the Schols General Paper, due to be included in the Foundation Scholarship exams from 2015/16.
For the artsier among us, writing ten pages about nothing in particular interspersed with highbrow musings about technology and public discourse might not be too far removed from our actual coursework. But this might be something of a shock to the system for people like maths or engineering students, who generally deal with more concrete concepts (apparently “Define left action of a group G on a set S, orbit of an element x of X, and fixing subgroup Fx” is a concrete concept to someone, anyway).
The move was approved in May by the Undergraduate Studies Committee for implementation this year, but has since been pushed back a year to allow for more time to prepare for the change. This would be a paper not linked to any one subject, but perhaps unique to different disciplines and not just based on the set curriculum. Clearly this idea is still in the germinating stages, but it’s an interesting development nonetheless.
A general paper would reward overall intellectual achievement and an ability to think and write broadly, but conversely less emphasis would be placed on the specific expertise many students gain in their chosen discipline.
The idea of using a general paper to test students’ intellectual abilities has been around for centuries. The most famous example is perhaps the Examination Fellowship exam at All Souls’ College Oxford, the only college that has no students at all. Two people are elected every year to a seven-year fellowship following a particularly grueling set of general exams, which is finished off with a viva voce (oral examination) in front of all the existing fellows of the College. Indeed, in his memorandum on the general paper, then Senior Lecturer Patrick Geoghegan specifically mentioned this exam, which until recently had an infamous one-word question on which candidates had to write an essay. Examples include “water”, “possessions”, and “error”.
Whatever the genesis of such an idea, the real question here is what the aim of scholarship should be. The origins of Schols are delightfully vague, and thus we won’t find much guidance there apart from knowing that scholars do indeed exist. But as the Scholars’ Secretary, Amy Worrall, noted in her response to the proposed addition, it’s a matter of defining what the scholarship should reward. A general paper would reward overall intellectual achievement and an ability to think and write broadly, but conversely less emphasis would be placed on the specific expertise many students gain in their chosen discipline, be it medicine or sociology.
Regardless of the motive, it should certainly be a nice move away from the bleaker aspects of studying for Schols, which can often simply mean learning huge volumes of information and not fully engaging with it.
The introduction of this paper could have a big impact on who actually succeeds in the scholarship exams. It’s probably reasonable to read this development as an effort to lower the numbers winning the scholarship and somewhat standardize the process. Regardless of the motive, it should certainly be a nice move away from the bleaker aspects of studying for Schols, which can often simply mean learning huge volumes of information and not fully engaging with it. Whether this is a positive remains to be seen, but it’s certain that future second years will have a very different Schols experience to those in past generations.
Photo by Sergey Alifanov for The University Times
