It’s the season when schools eagerly flaunt their latest star performers, in whichever exam system they go for. So we were introduced last week to four students who scored 5** in all seven subjects they took in the DSE.
This is a wonderful achievement and certainly the result of an impressive combination of ability and hard work.
A little discordant note for lovers of the humanities: all four of the super students “took physics, chemistry and biology as their electives,” said The Standard.
I wonder what is going on here. It is true that if you are aiming to hit the exam high spots the scientific subjects have one helpful feature. It is possible to answer a technical question in a way which is absolutely right.
If you have correctly memorised the reaction, the process or the organism then your answer can be given full marks. This is much less likely to happen in the vaguer or more ambiguous subjects. The square root of 4 is always 2. Whether Garibaldi or Cavour was the maker of modern Italy is a matter on which views may differ.
Consequently it is a routine complaint that people marking essay-type questions do not use the full range of possible grades. If you are being graded on the usual 100-point scale you can get 50, more or less, by filling a page; the mid-point will hover around 70 and the examiner will be very reluctant to go above 90.
There are occasional exceptions. Long ago during my brief period as a schoolteacher I did give one hapless candidate zero, fortunately for a mock exam. I had to explain to the young man concerned that he had written a fine essay on the Swedish King Charles XI, but the question was about Charles XII.
The converse of the scientists’ willingness to go up to 100 per cent is their difficulty in catering for weak candidates who really need what used to be known as a “gentleman’s pass.” The drawback of compulsory academic tourism (or breadth components in the curriculum as we are supposed to call it) is that some people find themselves in classes for which they have neither interest nor aptitude.
When I was teaching at a local university we had tricky cases every summer: individuals who really needed a basic pass in something in order to graduate. In the arts subjects a certain indulgence can be extended – the marks are all somewhat subjective anyway. The scientists had great difficulty with this because their exams produced automatic and unambiguous results, and sometimes a resit just produced another automatic and unambiguous failure.
Anyway I do not seek to detract in any way from the astonishing achievements of the four young scientists, but I do wonder if anyone who picks arts subjects has an equal chance of glory.
The other thing which may be going on here is that schools are shunting their best students into the science stream. This certainly happens in some places. Journalism departments are not looking for academic stars and academic stars generally do not seek us out.
The best local student we ever had was recruited outside the system on the strength of her stellar performance in a Polytechnic (as it still was) non-degree course in Bilingual Communication. She was doing that because she had been put in the A Level sciences stream and failed the complete physics/chemistry/biology set. This woman eventually won an award as the best graduating student in the whole school.
Now I realise that a society needs scientists. But it surely needs poets, composers, writers, lawyers and journalists as well. Politics does not lend itself to a scientific approach, even though it is a curious factlet that most of our national leaders have engineering degrees.
The social sciences are not really sciences, and many people, including me, think they never will be. But decisions have to be taken, and taken now, about many things on which science has only so much to say.
What we do as a society about wealth, health, sex, education, crime … cannot be determined by science because these issues involve values and ethics. These are not easy matters and a society which leaves them to its dumber members will not prosper. Schools should not be shunting all their finest young minds into a laboratory.
Although I suppose, these days, that may be the safest place for them.
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