The Final Examination Ritual, by Annick Labadie

Note: Last week, a few Oxford University members reacted rather lukewarmly to the first piece I wrote on this website. I’m not in the habit of justifying everything I write with in-depth position statements, so this will (hopefully) be a unique occurrence. If you thought last week’s post was lighthearted, swiftly move on to the next paragraph. If you thought it was preposterous, please click here for an unapologetic explanation.

I was already having a pretty bad day.

One of the university proctors¹, looking stately in his cap and gown, had shouted “you may begin” in a tone that said both there’s-a-broomstick-in-my-ass and be-very-afraid. 300 exam paper booklets, on subjects ranging from physical chemistry to medical anthropology methodology, had been opened in harmony in the Examination School².

I had spent three hours hunched over a squeaky wooden desk probably carpentered during a century where most students hovered around 4’7”. I was raiding my brain for information that was never really uploaded in the first place. Over the course of the previous months, drinking scotch until early morning and playing croquet wherever walking on grass was allowed had beaten the crap out of memorizing things for the sake of memorizing them.

During my undergraduate years, I had spent most of my time indiscriminately ingesting every nugget of exam-related knowledge, usually between practices and plane rides to Cincinnati or Louisville. Since such a habit was neither mentally nor emotionally sustainable over time, I was now very suspicious of this “learn how to learn” rhetoric professors use to justify asking students pointless questions. Example: name all the chemical elements in alphabetical order. Somehow, I firmly believed that the memory boosting antics I had been subjected to since kindergarten were over. Done. Memory development was what elementary school, high school, Trivial Pursuit cards, Nintendo DS Brain Age, and coach Mangina’s scouting reports were for.

So maybe I was becoming lazier; maybe I was becoming wiser. Maybe I was wiser about my laziness. Either way, it had been really hard to convince myself that investing time in learning equations comprising twelve variables and 3-page long derivations was a good idea. In my mind, “check page 327” will pay off just as well, if ever I want to introduce my children to a treatise on digital image segmentation techniques. Yes, for better or for worse, whiskey usually won over studying.

And a certain ant and grasshopper fable comes to mind.

As a result of this mild scholastic revolution, I stared blankly at my Applied Biomedical Engineering final exam questions, wondering which 5 of the 8 essay questions would generate at least 50 marks, Oxford’s passing grade for engineers. As an aside, a 70 is officially recognized as a “distinction” or A+, and 100 is theoretically on the scale but almost never employed due to tradition, making one wonder what the logic of a 100-point scale is exactly.

The proctors scrutinized my every move while strolling down the alleys of the North examination school³. They searched for any sign of cheating and of hands waving urgently for assistance. Anglo-Saxon figures, some wearing monocles, were framed in portraits covering the walls. They gravely frowned at my ineptitude. I was taking them pretty seriously too at the time, even though they all looked like Stephen Fry, Ambrose Burnside, Colonel Mustard, or some odd combination of the three. In other words, they were not to be taken seriously.

A huge clock, probably as old as the hobbit-sized desks, ticked loudly while a few of the 300 students coughed, sneezed, dropped pens on the ground, squealed in terror, and generally pissed me off. Four of these descriptors were true, and one was a lie. A sweaty physics student reading for a fluid mechanics paper⁴, whose BMI hovered around that of his IQ, was sitting on my right. At the time, I wanted to poke him right in the carotid with my red pen, because his breathing sounded like a broken lawnmower.

I kept moving in and out of exam focus, reminding myself that failure here would mean failing a degree at Oxford university, proving once and for all I had no business being in the school in the first place. Not necessarily something the Warden (director of sorts) of Rhodes house⁵ would appreciate. Of course, this fact had been highlighted two weeks prior by his secretary. When I’d asked if I could print some notes in her office because every other available printer in England was somehow broken, out of ink, or out of paper, she’d warmly replied, “Why certainly Annick, we’d love to help you. It’s in our best interest for you to pass your exams!”

Yikes.

Now might a good a time to mention that I become progressively melodramatic when it comes to anything that’s ever graded. This disposition is petty and completely obtuse of course. Still, I can’t seem to kick the exam-related inclination for hyperbole. So while my both my procrastination claim and related fear of failure are entirely factual, I must admit I did study my butt off in the end. The preparation was simply painful, cursory, and punctuated with about 1,350 trips to coffee shops as well as 1,347,432 games of Facebook Scramble. See, hyperbole. The rampant inefficiency of those study habits led me to think I hadn’t prepared at all.

As a result, it wasn’t party central up in the examination school. Not that exams are ever designed for entertainment purposes.

Then, things sort of got worse – or better – depending on your perspective. When I exited the building and walked onto the street after my exam, I was hit in the face with a dead fish. Deliberately. Over and over again.

But I’ll come back to that later.

Typical Exam Morning

During my undergraduate years, I took exams between interminable film sessions and interminable practices, usually while wearing my oversized grey sweatpants. Not in Oxford. Here, I had to dress up for the damn things. In this costume… called a “sub fusc”.

I had been told that the sub fuscs are to “Scholars” what chin guards and numbered jerseys are to football (soccer) players. “You must be joking” is how I had responded. The intellectual athlete’s clothing description was specified in a 1100-page book titled “Examination Regulations”, published yearly. If you’re in desperate need for an overpriced doorstop, click here.

The morning of the exam, I woke up to my alarm clock, about 3 hours after setting it. I hopped out of bed, buttoned the white collared shirt I had ironed at 2 in the morning. I wouldn’t have taken that step, but because it had festered in the laundry basket since the previous exam, two weeks before, it looked like a ball of crumpled printer paper. I fiddled with a black satin ribbon that was refusing to orient itself correctly around my collar.

When the ribbon cooperated (and this victory was short-lived), I took up the fight with a pair of black nylon tights that were rebelling against the scruff of my legs. Hadn’t shaved them in a while. It was exam season, you see. No time for pampering.

Why tights, you ask? My black socks were dirty. Actually, their subtle ammonium fragrance wasn’t the crowning factor in that decision. The black socks were out due to moistness. I had worn some pretty nasty things out of necessity a few times in my life, but I wasn’t spending 3 hours in an exam room with humid feet. And why was my footwear’s shade so important? The proctors had fined a friend of a friend of a friend of mine for £50 because she wore one black sock and one navy blue sock at her previous exam.

I kid you not. The proctors take their jobs pretty seriously.

Next, I slipped into the black trousers I had also fetched out of the laundry basket. Then, time to search for the black mortarboard I had to carry in my hands to enter the examination school.

No luck. Got a bit nervous. Searched some more. Still, nothing.

At 7:30 am, after a week of sleep deprivation and constant reminders of my overall intellectual uselessness, I was now panicking over a square headpiece. Panicking over what was essentially a wool & cardboard hat I had to carry with me due to fear of a fine from the proctors, yet couldn’t even wear on my head (I hadn’t graduated yet), for the exact same reason.

Great.

I looked vacuously outside my window for a minute or two. Finally, resigned to the loss of my mortarboard, I returned to my desk, and added “call Steve and get his hat” to a post-it note covering my laptop screen. The one that already included: (a) review non-linear diffusion algorithm, (b) instrumental amplifier (question 2), (c) buy 3 red carnations (covered market florist).

I left for breakfast wearing a black sleeveless gown that completed the sub fusc tour de force. In addition, I also carried along a zip-lock containing a pencil, two pens, a binder full of last minute observations, the proverbial post-it note, an identification badge, a candidate number⁶, and an approved calculator (that I found a few weeks back in the 5th store I visited, 3 hours and 15 bike-ridden miles later).

I stopped for a coffee and baguette and moved on to my next task; pre-exam shopping, another fun ritual signed Oxford University. As my sticky note stated, not only did I have to review exam-related information in about 50 minutes, I had to buy some flowers. Red ones. They’d been white for my first exam. Now red signified that the one I was about to take was my last. Pink was for all the middle ones.

Flower purchases are not mentioned anywhere in the examination regulation book. Students instigated this tradition about 20 years ago, claiming that exchanging a flower with one another would give them the extra dose of luck they needed to survive the exam. Of course, both the origin and exact meaning of the practice are disputable. I personally didn’t give a damn about that youthful tradition at the time, yet it was rumored that marching against it would result in examination failure. Since I definitely needed all the help I could manage (and felt equally strong about how stupid that rationalization was), I went to the florist, and bought 3 carnations in case more classmates needed one (read: they were on sale at 3 for 2).

Later, after reading up on medical imaging in the library while waiting for my buddy Steve to deliver his mortarboard, I walked down High Street while my knee-length gown clapped loudly into the wind. I turned right into the examination school entrance. There, I searched for my classmates within a mass of nondescript students and finally pinned the carnations onto their gowns while they returned the favor.

Some time passed, and a British classmate looked at me, blurting “you look like a massive twat”.

“Oh, ehh, I guess so. And with that clip-on [bow-tie] you’re wearing, think we’re both on the same boat.”

“You can tell?” was his reply, as he touched his neck diffidently.

Resentment for the attire subsided after that interaction. The sub fusc and flower provided some distraction away from some facts I was supposed to absorb through last-minute ocular osmosis. There was this twisted bond of communal ridicule I could feel with classmates I barely even knew. The grey sweatpants never quite had that effect on me. And I can’t say I hated it, even though I knew I looked like shit and smelled like it too.

Tourists took pictures of us as we waited under the large white tent in front of the exam school for our “BME2 for Biomedical Engineering Masters of Science by Coursework” paper to be called out in a microphone. Like cattle, we slowly marched towards the slaughterhouse.

A brutal, reeking morning was about to merge with a brutal, exhausting midday. And I hadn’t even gotten hit with the fish yet.

But more on that next week.

¹Proctors are professors volunteering their own time to administer exams and to scrutinize students for extended periods of time, while wearing ridiculous outfits.

²“Examination Schools” are official buildings where final exams are hosted, and where every dissertation, essay, proposal, and thesis each Oxford student ever submits for grading is collected. They’re stuffy, and archaic. They’re Oxonian (that word is actually in the dictionary – probably because a wildly popular version of that reference book is published by Oxford University Press- and it even sounds like what it’s supposed to describe).

³One of the two main examination rooms. The other 3 being labeled the South, East, and West Examination Schools. Surprised?

⁴Reading for = taking, and paper = exam on a specific subject

⁵Note: Rhodes House is a colonial looking building where most of the Rhodes foundation’s administrative stuff takes place, and where scholars from around the world meet for social events during their time in England.

⁶In oxford, all exams are taken anonymously to ensure fairness. As a result, a special identification number, called candidate number, is given to the student. That one kind of makes sense, I’ll admit.