25-04-2025
TOM UTLEY: It's ironic but my abject failure to match my father's stellar university career set me up for life...
One of my late father's proudest moments came in 1942, when the Cambridge authorities posted the results of the history finals exams, known as the Tripos, on the notice boards outside the university's Senate House.
Although he had been totally blind since he was nine, which meant he depended on Braille and having books read aloud to him, his name was right at the very top of the rankings.
With a stunning starred double-first, he had outshone every other student of history in his year. He was quietly proud of this for the rest of his life.
But there will be no such moment of glory for any similarly brilliant Cambridge students in future.
This month, it emerged that the university authorities have gone one step further than their decision in 2021 to abolish the 300-year-old practice of posting exam results on the Senate House notice boards, for all to see.
They've decided that in future they will stop telling students, even in private, anything at all about their position in the rankings.
As they explain it, the idea is to promote a 'healthy work-life balance' on campus and discourage a 'culture of overwork', which they say is having a negative impact on – you guessed it – undergraduates' 'mental health'.
Glittering
The decision means that from the next academic year onwards, those who excel will never know the full extent of their achievement. Nor will they experience that special satisfaction, felt by my father until his dying day, of knowing they were the brightest of the bright in their youth.
Of course, it will also mean that those who perform badly will be spared the heavy blow to their self-esteem of coming deep in the bottom half of the rankings, well beneath friends and contemporaries.
On that point, believe me, I know what I'm talking about.
Indeed, if you had visited Cambridge in 1975, three decades after my father's glittering achievement, you would have had to read a long way down the history Tripos rankings on the Senate House notice board before you reached my own name.
Reader, I blush to admit that I earned a dismal 2:2, the lowest score in my year among history students at Corpus Christi, the college that had also been my father's.
Had you raised your eyes to the top of the list, incidentally, you would have seen the name of my old friend Patrick Hodge. You know the one. He is now Lord Hodge, the Deputy President of the Supreme Court, who shot to nationwide fame the other day by proving himself able to tell the difference between a man and a woman.
Strictly between you and me, I'm not sure that most of us really needed a panel of judges, with double-first-class minds, to help us distinguish between the sexes. But I suppose we should all be grateful to Patrick and his colleagues for clearing up our poor, befuddled Prime Minister's confusion.
Brightest
I'm straying a little from my point this week, which is that we can't just wish away differences in intelligence, aptitude for certain tasks, capacity for hard work, biological sex or anything else, simply by pretending they don't exist.
The fact is that we are all different, and league tables of every sort are an invaluable aid to employers, policy-makers, parents seeking the best schools for their young, patients looking for the safest hospitals, and all kinds of other people, to help us distinguish between the wheat and the chaff.
Nowhere is this more true than in the academic world, where those who believe that all should have prizes have been dishing out top grades like Smarties, ever since the great dumbing-down of GCSEs, university degrees and other qualifications began in earnest under John Major and Tony Blair.
This is not only unfair to the brightest and most hard-working students, who these days find themselves given the same grades as the idle duds. It's unjust, too, to those who have little aptitude for academic work, but are given a false sense of their talents and employability.
Indeed, you have only to watch quiz programmes such as Tipping Point or The Chase to realise there are many in our universities these days who are quite unsuited to higher education.
I'm thinking of geography students who believe the River Amazon is in Africa, or students of history who think Julius Caesar was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo.
No wonder so many leave universities these days, with nothing to show for their time there apart from mountainous student debts and a job at McDonald's or Starbucks, flipping burgers or peddling undrinkable coffee.
Aren't examiners quite as likely to harm mental health by raising false expectations, through inflating grades and blurring the distinction between the mediocre and the best, than they would be by giving students an honest assessment of their performance in relation to others?
Meanwhile, shouldn't they also spare a thought for employers? In this world of cut-throat competition, after all, how are businesses supposed to choose between dozens of candidates, if they all have exactly the same qualifications with nothing to separate the whizz-kids from the wallies?
Yes, I know that league-table rankings are far from an infallible guide to the worth of an individual or an institution.
But if they are rigorously compiled, allowing for fair comparisons, at least they give some indication of relative strengths and weaknesses – whether of job candidates, schools, hospitals, education systems, pubs, restaurants, investment funds, airlines or anything else you may care to mention.
Of course, Cambridge is acting from the kindest of motives, hoping to avoid upsetting the snowflakes among today's young, who seem to go into meltdown at the slightest suggestion of stress. But abolishing rankings altogether does no favours to anyone.
As for me, I somehow survived the humiliation of that public display of my 2:2 degree on the Senate House notice board. I didn't take to my bed for the rest of the year, wailing about the damage to my mental health.
Shame
After a pint or two to drown my shame, in fact, I simply resolved to make the best of it, telling myself I'd got no worse than I deserved. Ah, well, perhaps in those days we were just made of sterner stuff than today's lot.
But here's a remarkable thing. The following year, after I'd successfully applied to join a graduate editorial training scheme in the West Country, I asked the training manager how on earth he had set about whittling down the 1,200 candidates for the available places, of which there were only 12.
He told me the first thing he did was bin applications from all graduates with first-class degrees, believing they were too intellectual to write simply about the sort of stories that interested ordinary readers.
As it happens, I think this was pure rubbish, and it wasn't true even in those far-off days when only a tiny proportion of the student population won firsts.
But I wasn't complaining. For it meant that my failure to match anything like my father's achievement had kept me in the running for a career that has looked after me very nicely throughout the half century since.
The moral for others who score disappointing exam results? Cheer up. You never know your luck.
