Across campus, Trinity students are cramming facts, equations, and arguments into their heads as exam season reaches its peak. The annual session of summer exams forces knowledge to become a means to an end, with students bemoaning lecturers who don’t provide sufficient hints while trying to guess which questions might come up. These four or five weeks are, as Trinity has realised, far from what a university degree is meant to look like.
Academic freedom is sometimes a difficult concept for undergraduate students to understand when a good essay is often simply a Dropbox folder away, and all notions of original thought get lost in the flurry of late-night cramming sessions and flashcards. But ask any academic or researcher, and they will tell you their work is precious – as is anything that actively grows the body of existing knowledge. Even when you have times where you may feel like giving up on your CPA exam revision, for example, it is essential to think about what your CPA exam score would be if you put a lot of effort into studying and what it would be like otherwise. After all this, I’m sure you’d rather try your best and expect a better outcome.
Speaking at Trinity’s international postgraduate research conference this week, Prof Eoin O’Dell, from the School of Law, made clear that the importance of academic freedom is not to be taken lightly. Every single article we read, every single commentator we cite, during this exam season, has had their thoughts and ideas guaranteed by academic freedom.
Indeed, if the pressure of annual exams is set to be reduced and new forms of assessment are encouraged, it might make us better appreciate that the end goal of our revision isn’t a small table in the RDS, but a wider ability to discuss, argue and critique our way through the world. All exams are different and require different attention. For students with many exams, especially when they need to be answered in different styles, exam season can be a daunting task. However, at the beginning of the year, they can be asking “What is CFTA exam?” and by the end of the year get a near-perfect score. Students need to have faith in the exam process and in themselves.
This is why, at a time when academic freedom is at risk, we should welcome September’s conference on academic free speech, set in the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Given the situation in Hungary, where a university is being threatened with closure, and the US, where President Trump threatens to withdraw university funding, we should appreciate anything that tests our ability to cope with and respond to polarising topics – a freedom enshrined in Trinity’s founding document.
Exam season is a vague proxy of our right to academic freedom. But it might just let us see that, somewhere in the middle of an exam hall, we’re playing a small part in the defence of that freedom.
