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54 Hours of Examinations
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Diaries
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By overconvergent
Posted Mon Mar 08, 2004 at 11:43:31 AM PDT
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In Littlewood's A Mathematician's Miscellany, he talks about the old Cambridge Mathematics Tripos examination - the final exam for undergraduates studying mathematics at Cambridge University.
The idea was to create a strict order of merit for the students. This developed into an examination that, thankfully, has no peer in today's world.
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| He recounts that in the 1880s, one of these examinations was formed of 18 three-hour examinations, marked out of 33,541.
The examinees were graded into three classes. The highest score was 16,368 (or about 48%), the lowest score which achieved honours (called "being a Wrangler" in Cambridge terminology) was 3,123 (about 9%), and the lowest nonzero score was 247 (under 1%).
I did suggest this to my students as a possible way to grade my course, but I don't think that they were enthusiastic.
The bottom scorer was called the Wooden Spoon; they were presented with a large and ornate wooden spoon as a gift from their friends. Here is a picture of one of these.
Reference: the chapter "From the Mathematical Tripos", A Mathematician's Miscellany, J. E. Littlewood. |
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