Playing croquet with the examiner: “he was much like other people”

Exam results can be a source of bitter disappointment as well as triumph. In 1910 Mr A Kershaw of Morecambe in Lancashire was distraught about his daughter Ethel’s failure of her Senior Exam (school leaving exams). The exams in question were administered by University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate (UCLES), now Cambridge Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge.

Taking matters into his own hands, Kershaw wrote to the Secretary of UCLES, John Neville Keynes, to suggest that there must have been an unfortunate error in Ethel’s results. “Can it be possible, do you think that there has been some mistake?” He went on to offer an unusual solution: “I do not want to bribe you in any sense but you shall be treated handsomely. Yes, I would pay for you & Mrs Keynes a trip to Paris and would be highly pleased to do so if you could discover a mistake. Her [candidate] no was 1540.”

There is no record of any reply from John Neville Keynes (whose son John Maynard Keynes went on to change the face of economics) but the survival of this letter is testament to his sense of humour. As Secretary of UCLES and later Registrary (most senior administrator) of the University of Cambridge, he was not a man to contemplate a bribe.

Mr Kershaw’s letter is just one item in the thousands of documents (from exam papers to timetables to correspondence) that form the archives of Cambridge Assessment, tracing the history of an organisation that now designs and delivers assessments to more than 8 million learners in 170 countries. Its three boards - Cambridge English Language Assessment, Cambridge International Examinations and OCR – are all based in Cambridge where the parent organisation is one of the city’s largest employers.

Many of the young people who got their results in the last fortnight will have taken OCR exams which include not just GCSE and A levels but many other qualifications. The history of these public exams goes back to the 1850s. Before that, applicants to public schools took specific entry exams and applicants to universities sat exams at the institutions they were hoping to enter.

"Cambridge University was six months behind Oxford in establishing a programme of exams, aimed at school leavers, which could be taken at centres round the country," explained Cambridge Assessment Group Archivist, Gillian Cooke.  "The first exams were certificate-based, in that candidates had to pass a range of subjects, rather in the style of today's International Baccalaureate. Known as the Cambridge Locals, they were sat by just 370 pupils in eight centres."

Papers were delivered and personally overseen by examiners who travelled, generally by train and wearing academic dress, with locked boxes containing the exam papers.  Not every examiner came up to scratch: another gem in the Cambridge Assessment archive is a note written in 1904 by the head mistress of Norwich Girls’ School in which she reports scathingly that “he [the examiner] did not as a rule wear cap & gown” and that she “wd like a change of examiner”.

Certificates, given in three honours classes, were awarded to Junior candidates (under age 16) who sat one level of papers and Senior candidates (under age 18) who sat another.  For the first few years, candidates were exclusively male and it took the efforts of formidable campaigners, notably Miss Frances Mary Buss of North London Collegiate School, to open up the exams to girls. The first girls sat the exams unofficially in 1863 but it was not until 1867 that they could officially take the exams and receive certificates.

Exam timetables were gruelling – and fell just before Christmas until the examination season was shifted to July. Junior candidates sitting their exams on December 17, 1858 started their day at 9am with Pure Mathematics (Q4: How does Euclid define Ratio: when are two ratios said to be equal?) and finished it at 8pm when the time allotted for the Latin paper (translation into, as well as from, Latin was compulsory) ended. 

Another archive treasure is a letter (dated 1873) from a girl called Amy to “My Dearest Papa and Mama” which reflects the emotions such a regime inflicted.  Amy writes that after the “mathematical paper, arith & algebra”, she resorted to smelling salts (“sal volatile and eau de cologne”) to calm her nerves before embarking on the history paper.  She describes the examiner as a “Fellow of Cambridge cap-a-pie [from head to foot]… very severe looking, sat at the head of the room, or walked up & down, frightened me out of my little wits”. As the tests came to an end, Amy is invited to a croquet party where the Examiner is her partner: “I found he was much like other people."

In comparison Candidate 4733, who sat his exams in the 1890s and included a note to the examiner in his papers, is positively blasé. He apologises for his bad paper, “but I never did know much trigonometry”, and goes on to express his excitement at being on the train in just a few hours.  “HAPPY XMAS and PROSPEROUS NEW YEAR,” he writes. In a postscript he adds: “I am sending you a few blank sheets since I believe you are paid by weight.” Examiners were indeed rewarded by the weight of the scripts they marked: in the 1860s, markers of arithmetic earned 9 shillings and 6 pence per pound, history 12 shillings, and classics 18 shillings.

The establishment of the initial exam cycle was a triumph of planning, the outcome of a board of Syndics, which included several academic heavyweights from the Cambridge Colleges and a good sprinkling of reverends. Candidates were responsible for providing their own paper (the size of which was stipulated as “Cambridge Scribbling Demy” – a bit smaller than A4) and a list of stationers was provided. At least four feet in length was recommended for individual desks – a space allowance no longer possible in many exam halls.

Expansion of UCLES exams overseas began in 1864 when ten students sat the Cambridge Locals in Trinidad. The logistics of administering an international exam system could be challenging. When the steamers carrying the papers were delayed, examinations were postponed. In 1897 the scripts collected in Ghana were lost until a key was found to the box containing them. During the First World War a ship carrying (among other things) exam scripts back to Britain was torpedoed off the Indian coast and the work of some candidates was lost.  During the Second World War, some of the young civilians detained in the Sime road internment camp in Singapore managed to sit their exams, studying at first in secret and then with permission from the Japanese.

Over the years the changing style of examination questions reflects the values and preoccupations of the periods in which they were devised.  “Write a letter to a friend in Australia, announcing your intention to emigrate” invites the English Composition paper in 1858. “Give a short account of the Cotton trade” is a choice in the geography paper that same year.  Hot on the heels of the railway bonanza, a question in English law remains unexpectedly topical: “How is a railway company enabled to make a road through another person’s property?”

Shifting policies on matters of learning, and what education is all about, are also evident. “Regard will be paid to handwriting and spelling throughout the Examinations” advise the early Regulations firmly.  Dictation and reading aloud were a key part of the assessment. Grammar and a grasp of grammatical terminology figured prominently. Candidates taking the geography paper were expected to be able to draw from memory outline maps of entire continents and have an excellent grasp of rivers, regional centres of production, and the borders of counties as well as countries.

From the outset there was debate about assessment and education, from the dangers of learning by rote to excessive pressure on pupils. A letter to the Journal of Education in 1893 on the subject of the English Literature exam asserts that the paper encourages “cramming” and “so far from encouraging “first hand-acquaintance” with the authors mentioned, “scarcely gives a chance to the candidate of showing that he has read them”. The authors listed are Dryden, Addison, Pope, Thomson, Johnson and Gray.  That same year, an examiner noted after marking the dictation that “the greatest difficulty was found in ‘Alexander’, for which youthful ingenuity contrived to find almost forty different spellings”.

The pressure to achieve is another running theme: in her letter of 1873 Amy recalls that the first day of exams went so badly she feared that she would have to “take to scrubbing floors for a living”. Happily, at the end of the week the examiner partnering her in the croquet game assures her “in strictest confidence” that he has looked over her papers and that she has “every chance of taking a First” (grades were given as for degrees). She lost at croquet: “I always do.”

The Cambridge Assessment archives are used by scholars around the world and also provide a valuable point of reference for the teams devising forthcoming exams, who use them for comparability purposes, to monitor changes in questioning style and to develop the curriculum. The Cambridge Assessment website is an extraordinarily rich and lively resource offering interactive activities as well as a wealth of information http://www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/

On 1 October Cambridge Assessment will host a free seminar at which archivist Gillian Cooke will explore the role of the corporate archives from the organisation’s beginnings as the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate in 1858 and through subsequent years of continuity and change. The event will take place at the Cambridge Assessment Offices, 9 Hills Road, Cambridge from 3.30pm. For details go to www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/events/details/view/the-cambridge-assessm...

The information in this article is drawn from two publications. Examining the World: A History of the University of Cambridge Examinations Syndicate, edited by Sandra Raban, is published by Cambridge University Press. Chapter 2, Cambridge Local Examinations 1858-1945 is written by Andrew Watts. The 1858 Question Paper Book is also published by Cambridge University Press. The local exams question papers for 1858 are held by Cambridge University Library.

For more information about this story contact Alex Buxton, Office of Communications, University of Cambridge, amb206@admin.cam.ac.uk.

Inset Images from top:  Letter to John Neville Keynes from A. Kershaw, 1910 (Ref: PP/JNK 2/1, reproduced by kind permission of Cambridge Assessment Group Archives); Timetable for Junior Candidates (Ref: Cam.c.11.51.1, reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library); Bahamas Examination Room, December 1948 (Ref: M/P 1/2, reproduced by kind permission of the Cambridge Assessment Group Archives); Senior Question Paper - Geography (Ref: Cam.c.11.51.1, reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library).