All Souls, Oxford Should Continue to Put Genius to the Test

     

For more than a century, prospective Fellows of All Souls, Oxford have had to sit a frightening exam paper that contains no questions and just one word. Now it has been dropped – and Harry Mount (failed, 1994) says the college is the poorer for it.

Swots across the country are weeping over their trigonometry textbooks this week, because the hardest exam in the world has just got easier. Dumbing down has seeped upwards into Britain’s seat of highest learning.

All Souls College, Oxford – the graduates-only college, where the brainiest of brainiacs breathe a rarefied intellectual air in three Gothic quads strung along the High Street – has just dropped the most difficult part of its entrance exam.

And I should know quite how difficult it is – I failed it in 1994. At least I am in eminent company: the historian Lord Dacre, the literary critic Lord David Cecil, and the writers John Buchan and Hilaire Belloc all failed. Sir Isaiah Berlin, John Redwood, William Waldegrave and the journalist Matthew d’Ancona passed. As did Sir Jeremy Morse, the banker and former chancellor of Bristol University, who gave his name to Colin Dexter’s Oxford detective.

Since 1878, anyone with a First in their Oxford undergraduate Finals has been invited to sit the All Souls Prize Fellowship Examination at the end of September – a gruelling, three-day ritual, with six three-hour exams, one each morning and afternoon. Only those who have sat their Finals within the past three years are eligible; so the examinees tend to be in their early twenties. Women have been admitted since 1979. Of the 500 undergraduates who take a First each year, only 30 or so accept the invitation to go for one of the two annual Prize Fellowships. It says something for David Cameron’s modesty that, despite getting a First in PPE in 1988, he refused to sit the exam. I was more arrogant.

I sat two specialist papers on history, my undergraduate subject, two general ones and a language paper. And then came the hardest, most brain-straining paper of all – the one simply called "Essay"; the one the All Souls softies have now decided to drop altogether. The horrifying thing about Essay is not how difficult it is, but how simple. You turn over the plain blank sheet of A4 paper, and there is a single word on it; you have nothing else to write about for the next three hours. My word was "Miracles". Other words have included Bias, Style, Chaos, Mercy, Innocence, Novelty, Morality and Water. A L Rowse (1903–97), the waspish Shakespearean scholar, won his Prize Fellowship by writing on "Possessions".

The Essay is an exceptional test of intelligence. Ask someone when the Battle of Hastings took place, and they’ll either get it right or wrong. Ask them, "How did Athens run the Laurium silver mines?" – as I was asked in my ancient history Finals – and the answer is still pretty specific. But ask someone – or don’t even ask them, just state to someone – a single word, and there’s infinite room for genius, or stupidity, to expand within the word’s parameters.

"It’s not the sort of exam you can blag," says a friend of mine, who sat the exam in 1993, when the Essay was "Error". "It was the first exam that I’d ever come across where I couldn’t fall back on native wit and blagging, as I had done with my Finals."

So, I’m afraid I must disagree with the Warden of All Souls, Sir John Vickers, a former member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, who has just said that the Essay is no longer useful for testing the qualities for admission – "exceptional analytical ability, breadth and depth of knowledge, independent-mindedness and clarity of thought and expression". All of those qualities are brilliantly tested by Essay, which also has a magical romance to it that you don’t normally associate with exams. And All Souls is poorer by its passing. Taking away Essay removes a chunk of mystique from this most mysterious of Oxbridge colleges.

Read the rest of the article

May 27, 2010