You May Now Turn Over Your Papers
Seriously...
BBC
4.1 • 885 Ratings
🗓️ 8 July 2016
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Cambridge Classics professor, Mary Beard, tells the intriguing story of the history of exams and asks what are exams really for. In her quest for an answer, she scales the rooftops of King's College, Cambridge, grills a well-known comedian in Latin and discovers Charles Darwin was a terrible student more interested in finding beetles than doing his exams.
Mary delves into the world of exams past and present in the company of comedian Richard Herring, roof-walker and academic, Katherine Rundell, fellow Classicist Simon Goldhill and others.
Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to this seriously exam. I'm your own |
| 0:10.1 | violator FEMI Martin. Please take a seat. Today's exam is about exams. I take it you've |
| 0:18.8 | been revising for it? Good. So without further ado I'll hand you over to Mary Beard. You may now turn over your papers. |
| 0:27.0 | I had nightmares for 40 years. I go into the exam and I haven't prepared the right paper. |
| 0:40.0 | You open the exam script and you've never seen it before or I pick up my pen and I can't |
| 0:46.3 | write the word that I want to write. Sound familiar? There's my absolutely number |
| 0:51.1 | one recurring green. |
| 0:52.6 | Having to sit either my math's day level |
| 0:55.1 | or sometimes day levels I didn't do that horror |
| 0:57.8 | of having to do an exam that you have no preparation for. |
| 1:02.4 | And then happily you wake up, but in a terrible sweat. |
| 1:06.0 | I haven't sat an exam for decades, |
| 1:09.0 | unless you count the driving test. |
| 1:11.0 | Fourth time lucky, I confess. but like thousands of others I still have |
| 1:15.7 | nightmares just like that. Now of course as Mary Beard Professor of Classics I'm |
| 1:21.2 | officially on the other side of the whole process. But in my |
| 1:25.0 | heart I'm still taking the damn things. And over the 40 years I've been in the |
| 1:30.4 | business, what has come to intrigue me is how exams and all their funny rituals |
| 1:36.6 | have got into our collective psyches. Remember this? |
| 1:40.6 | He was terrible. |
| 1:45.0 | I sat in the big hall and put my pagrapolos on the desk and my spare pencil and my support |
| 1:50.7 | gong and my chewing... |
... |
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