In Defence of Examinations

One of the clichés of our time is that examinations are unjust. It is, perhaps worth having a look at any cliché to see what has happened to the truth in it - has it survived repetition or not? I feel particularly strongly about the confusion that is generally involved in the attack on examinations. First of all, there is not just one set of examination which is under fire, but at least two: the school-leaving and university-qualifying examinations of GCE A-level, and the final examination at the end of the university undergraduate course. It may be that both of these kinds of examinations are bad; but if so they may be bad in different ways.

And then the examination system, itself, is attacked for two separate faults. One is that the existence of examinations necessitates a syllabus, and that this has a narrowing and restrictive effect on teaching and learning. The second fault is quite different - namely, that the examinations themselves are unfair, and this again in two ways. It is said that the standards of the examiners cannot be made uniform and that equally good candidates may get widely different results: secondly, it is said that the three-hour written paper is in itself unfair to those candidates who have bad memories, bad nerves or are otherwise to be labelled "bad examinees", but yet who may be just as good as other candidates in some respects.

Is there any way out of this? For there is no doubt that it would be very agreeable to have an end to this particular kind of complaining before very much longer - if for no other reason than that candidates and their families get extremely worried and depressed, not so much by the examinations themselves as by the whole atmosphere of gloom and terror which is coming to surround them.

The first thing to decide is the fundamental question, whether we need examinations or not. The obvious answer to this is that if some people are cleverer than others, and if it is of interest to universities or future employers to discover who is cleverer than whom, then we need examinations, because there is no other equally efficient way of distinguishing between what people can do. But this may be too superficial a view. It is true that at present (and for the foreseeable future) we live in a condition of scarcity, so that there must be competition for available jobs, and at an earlier stage for available university or polytechnic places. But since this situation does not exist of logical necessity, it might be worth, even now, working out a system of selection which did not involve examining people on a particular occasion, but rather keeping records of their achievements which could be computerised, so that the most suitable further training or job could be found.

The difficulties in the way of such a scheme are, however, very great. Many people might prefer even the distasteful business of examinations to the somewhat sinister sense of being under observation from the cradle to the grave, or at least from entry to school to departure for a job. But it seems to me that, difficult though this solution is, if there is enough evidence against examinations, then even in our present situation, we should try seriously, .and not as mere fantasy, to discover an alternative to them.

Let us assume, though, that there is no alternative, and that as long as people need to be selected for things, examinations are necessary. The next question is: are our present examinations intolerably bad tools of selection? First of all, are their syllabuses too restrictive? It seems absolutely necessary, at least at school to have agreed syllabuses of some kind if one is going to have external examinations, common to groups of schools and examined by common examiners. In principle it would be possible for at least part of every examination - even at school - to be a paper on a subject chosen by the candidate. In practice the difficulty of achieving fair examining on this scheme would be insuperable.

Complaints about the syllabus tend to spill over into complaints about the methods of examining. For those who dislike the one tend also, to dislike the other. The great educational contrast today is between, on the one hand, the more accumulation of facts, where the pupil is a passive recipient of pre-digested material and on the other hand, project-work in which the pupil finds things out for himself. So those who think that the syllabus of the GCE is restrictive also think that people should be examined, if at all, on what they have done for themselves rather than on (to use the cliché phrase) what they can "churn out" of the pre-digested material.

The very same demand is made at university level. Examinations at the level of finals should, it is sometimes said, be more like examinations for doctorates. They should offer candidates the chance to show what they have been able to do on their own, in the way of original research. There are at least two serious objections to this proposal, at whatever level it is made. One is that, desirable though it may be for everyone to be enterprising and inquiring, there is in fact a very limited number of subjects on which undergraduate - to say nothing of schoolboys - are in a position to do research.

At primary school level it is excellent to see the children projects, because you are thereby teaching them how to find things out, and how to observe and to record. No one would demand that their findings should be original. Real - as opposed to pretended -research cannot be undertaken except on the basis of a wide knowledge of what other people have done in the same field. It is this knowledge which has to be acquired at school and at university.

Children can, of course, criticise the findings of their elders, and will do so increasingly as their knowledge increases. But there is a pre-posterous lack of scholarly humility in the suggestion that it is a waste of time to read what others have thought -whether about chemistry, history or literature.

The other objection to examination on "project work" is a practical one. But the work and the examining must be cumbersome and extremely time-consuming. It is possibly all right for some pupils at secondary schools to go out with their notebooks to question dockers or miners about their day's work or their average earnings. But, alas, what would happen if everyone did it.

And, to return to the question of fairness, how would these exercises be assessed? FOL part of the question the examiner would have to ask would be: was it a sensible subject to undertake? How good was the advice he got in carrying out such research? and so on. I feel a deep scepticism about the possibilities of examining children, or undergraduates, when there are so many incomparable factors in their work. I also doubt the value of such work. Is it really a good training for the future to allow children to base general conclusions on just their own investigations?

Nonetheless, if examinations are to remain tests of knowledge and of ability to think about what one has read, there may still be ways of making them less nerve-wracking. But the method of giving candidates three weeks or a fortnight to write their extended essay (a method now in use in some universities) is, in fact, I suspect, just as productive of nervous strain as the old system of three-hour papers.

What people seem to dread most about the three-hour ordeal is that they will, just at that moment suffer a total failure of memory and forget even the date of the battle of Waterloo. I personally see no reason why all examinations, while lasting the statutory three hours, should not permit the candidate to bring in with him a text, a dictionary, a list of dates or formulae - whatever would help him to put aside this particular fear .The weaker candidates would write less than they do now in three hours because they would spend more time looking things up. But the really good candidates would do just as well or better than they do now. The examination could become less a test of memory and more a test of understanding. The particular nightmare fear which now leads some candidates to breakdowns and others to cheating (usually pathetically incompetently) would be done away with. I wish very much that some university or some GCE examining board would try this for a year.

African Economic Problems

The fundamental weakness in African economies, the product of history and physical features, can be summed up in a single phrase - the low development of primary industry, i.e. agriculture in all forms, fishing and mining. Africa is not in a position to live by selling skills - i.e. importing raw materials, adding value, and re-exporting; primary production is therefore vital. This is not often so brutally stated, for reasons which will appear. Wherever it is forgotten, the danger of attempting to build an elaborate secondary and tertiary system with no primary base or motive power immediately arises.

Low primary production is associated with low purchasing power and low division of labour; therefore, a small, market, low opportunity for investment in secondary industry, and a low level of trade. Even in Zambia or the Congo, where primary mineral resources have been highly developed, the resulting trade in minerals lay to Europe, and the purchasing power generated was largely exported too - the white miners of Northern Rhodesia spent most of their earnings in southern Africa, the Congo Belgians in Europe. Certainly, African earnings - were remitted to a poverty-stricken subsistence economy in distant rural areas; but they were mainly dissipated in social expenditure there, and little found its way into agricultural improvement. It is where cash-crop agriculture has been strongly developed that the effects on African purchasing power have been felt in a growing local market and in further productive investment.

Low-yield subsistence agriculture - apart from its effects on health and energy - means low division of labour, and a tiny market even for food. There four families out of five are farming, the market for farm produce, outside the producing family, is 0.25 per cent of a family: it only rises to 1.5 per cent when the proportion of all families in farming has fallen to 40 per cent. It is very largely this low food production which marks the contrast with medieval Europe, where there was usually just enough food to allow division of labour and the development of a market economy.

Subsistence agriculture, a falling death-rate, and scanty employment opportunity outside farming implies huge underemployment in crowded rural areas. When widespread education is added to this explosive mixture, concealed underemployment is revealed as overt unemployment, because the differential in pay between the modern and the traditional sector is so high. The educated young, in a mobile society, will go where the rewards are greatest; they join the queue seeking wage-paid work in the urban sector.

An additional problem arises from the late entry of Africa into an already developed World economy, with its tendency to produce substitutes for tropical raw materials and with, allegedly, less elasticity of demand for raw materials than for manufactures - though this last point will need more argument. This situation in the outer world is the more serious because the inter-territorial market within Africa has been so hard to develop.

Civilization

I have not yet defined civilization; but perhaps I have made definition superfluous. Anyone, I fancy, who has done me the honour of reading so far will by now understand pretty well what I mean. Civilization is a characteristic which differentiates what anthropologists call 'advanced, from what they call 'low' or 'backward' societies. So soon, as savages begin to apply reason to instinct, so soon, as they acquire a rudimentary sense of values -so soon, that is, as they begin to distinguish between ends and means, or between direct means to good and remote – they have taken the first step upward. The first step towards civilization is the correcting of instinct by reason. The second, the deliberate rejection of immediate satisfactions with a view to obtaining subtler advantages. The hungry savage, when he catches a rabbit, eats it there and then, or instinctively takes it home, as a fox might, to be eaten raw by his cubs; the first who, all hungry though he was, took it home and cooked it was on the road to Athens. He was a pioneer, who with equal justice may be described as the first decadent. The fact is significant. Civilization is something artificial and unnatural. Progress and Decadence are interchangeable terms. All who have merely increased material sensibility, and most of those even who have merely increased material comfort, have been hailed by contemporaries capable of profiting by their discoveries as benefactors, and denounced by all whom age, stupidity, or jealousy rendered incapable, as degenerates. It is silly to quarrel about words: let us agree that the habit of cooking one's victuals may with equal propriety be considered a step towards civilization or a falling away from the primitive perfection of the upstanding

From these primary qualities, reasonableness and a sense of value, may spring a host of secondaries; a taste for truth and beauty, tolerance, intellectual honesty, fastidiousness, a sense of humour, good manners, curiosity, a dislike of vulgarity, brutality, and over-emphasis, freedom from superstition and prudery, a fearless acceptance of the good things of life, a desire for complete self-expression and for a liberal education, a contempt for utilitarianism and philistinism, in two words - sweetness and light. Not all societies that struggle out of barbarism grasp all or even most of these, and fewer still grasp any of them firmly. That is why we find a considerable number of civilized societies and very few highly civilized, for only by grasping a good handful of civilized qualities and holding them tight does a society become that.

But can an entity so vague as a society be said to have or to hold qualities so subtle? Only in the vaguest sense. Societies express themselves in certain more or less permanent and more or less legible forms which become for anthropologists and historians monuments of their civility. They express themselves in manners, customs and conventions, in law and in social and economic organisation; above all in the literature, science and art they have been appreciated and encouraged: less surely they tell us something about themselves through the literature, science and art, which they mayor may not have appreciated, but which was created by artists and thinkers whom they produced. All these taken together may be reckoned - none too confidently – to compose a legible symbol of a prevailing attitude of life. And it is this attitude, made manifest in these more or less public and permanent forms, which we call civilization.

Independence

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organising its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when along train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of their colonies, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government.

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having, in direct object, the es1ablishrllent of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world:

He has refused his assent to laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and, when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He is, at this time, transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun, with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy of the head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow-citizens, taken captive on the high seas, to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren or to fall themselves by their hands. He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguishable destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.

In every stage of these oppressions, we have petitioned for redress, in the most humble terms; our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have we been waiting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them, from time to time, of attempts made by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred, to disallow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They, too, have been deaf to the voice of justice and consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace, friends.

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in general Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved'; and that, as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war,  conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And, for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honour.

The Menace of Locusts

The desert locust - schistocerca gregaria - is one of the greatest natural threats to agriculture, and hence to human life, in much of Africa and Asia. It can invade nearly 11 million miles, an area that contains roughly 20% of the world's land surface, 10% of the world's population and all or parts of 65 different countries.

Locusts normally live for about four months but they can slow down their body processes and extend their life span to a year if there is a shortage of vegetation or if the climate is cold. Each female locust produces about 200 eggs in her short life. The young locusts have no wings and are known as "hoppers". They live mainly in sandy desert areas. In dry years when vegetation is sparse locusts resemble green grasshoppers. They prefer to hunt about by themselves for food and to stay away from each other. Their desire for solitude disperses them over wide areas, thus helping the species to survive. But when, at rare and irregular intervals, there are heavy rains in the desert, they begin to breed in enormous numbers. Moreover, their manner and appearance change. They crowd together, touching one another's bodies repeatedly and their colour changes from green to black, yellow and red. They become voraciously hungry and set off in enormous swarms in search of food.

The ability of the locusts to change in appearance was first detected in 1921 by Sir Boris Uvaroy, now in charge of the Anti-locust Research Centre in London, and the leading world expert in the behaviour of these insects. His discovery answered one of the oldest questions about locusts: how did they vanish in some years and reappear in others? The answer was that they didn't vanish. They simply had a diabolical way of escaping attention. They change back to the form resembling ordinary grasshoppers and were mistaken for a separate species.

Locusts also have a remarkably keen sense of smell. This guide the migrating swarms to trees, crops and pastures in their search for food. They can fly at about 10 miles per hour but prefer to be carried by winds and can travel 30000 miles within their lifetimes. Since they breed as they go, the distance that a swarm and its progeny can cover becomes enormous. During the great locust plague of 1968 one group arose from the deserts in the far south of the Arabian Peninsula near Aden, pressed north-wards through Yemen and Saudi Arabia and then crossed the Red Sea turning south again to attack the United Arab Republic and the Sudan, thus travelling approximately 2,000 miles in eight months.

Research into locust behaviour is carried out in the London centre which actually breeds 600,000 locusts a year for experimental purposes. But efforts to control and contain the locust swarms are led by the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAG) with headquarters in Rome and II field stations, all equipped with radio transmitters ranging from Morocco and Mauritania in the West to Persia and Pakistan in the East.

Unfortunately Nature herself cannot offer any serious challenge to the locusts once favourable conditions for breading have occurred and the swarms begin to multiply. The locust's natural enemies such as certain beetles, flies and wasps are neither sufficiently numerous or mobile to reduce the swarms to any extent and although birds regularly attack locusts their effect is only marginal. Man is now attempting to prevent such plagues by a variety of means.

One method is to scatter poisoned bait in the breeding grounds before the locusts begin to fly. Suitable bail is bulky to transport but can be spread by hand without expensive and sophisticated equipment. The chief difficulty is that the areas where breeding occurs are m- mainly uninhabited and themselves cover a very wide area. Another method is by insecticide sprays which are released on the swarms in the air by a fleet of light aircraft. Light oil is mixed with the insecticide to prevent if from evaporating in the sun or being washed away by the rain. One hazard which the pilots face is that the engines of their planes can become clogged with flying locusts which causes them to return to land. Attack from the air has of course proved vastly more effective than spraying from the ground but the real solution is to destroy the locusts before they become air-borne at all and this requires teams of locusts scouts whose job it is to report any signs of swarms forming.

Recently even space research has contributed to the anti-locust campaign. There is a U.S. weather satellite tracking station at Asmara in Ethiopia. The satellite in space transmits the pattern of wind zones to the station on earth and, since locusts tend to ride with prevailing winds, they normally congregate in a zone and scouts can know where to look for swarms.

Nevertheless human intervention has so far only managed to contain a plague, never yet to stop it from occurring. Yet even this resulted in the saving of 15 billion dollars' worth of crops in 1968, the most recent plague year.

The Arabs in the area of the Red Sea tend to take a philosophical view of the problem. "The locusts are there to show us that life is not ours alone", they say. "It is written that when there are no more locusts there will be no more world.”