by Alina Chen
I suppose I still had some faith in the School’s capacity to sympathise, if not empathise with their students before the 2022 January exam. So the feedback of the Economics department came as an interesting yet frankly appalling surprise after the EC201 Microeconomics January exam, in which they stated that the grade distribution was “now in line again with performance pre-pandemic”. Indeed, 24-hour online exams in the past two years have caused significant grade inflation, motivating the School to close the discrepancy as soon as realistically possible. The insistence to conduct exams entirely in person in January was presumably a part of the School’s effort to retain the pre-pandemic normality, which unfortunately came apart as the end of term drew closer and Covid cases perked up.
Despite resorting to online arrangements, the Economics department succeeded in lowering the mean percentage mark in January exams from 68.7% in 2021 down to 60% this year for EC201. Nevertheless, the general consensus from fellow students contradicts the department’s explanation: they have attributed this significant change in grades solely to the “timed nature” of this online exam.
But is this really the case? I was by no means the only one who was surprised that the January Microeconomics paper was originally written for the purpose of an in-person exam. Due to the last-minute announcement for the change in exam format, the departments had no time to change the paper, which had already been written and checked. Had the Covid-19 situation not worsened as the winter approached, everyone on the EC201 course would have had to sit the same paper, close-booked, for less than half the duration of the actual online exam. This is because the Economics department had chosen to allocate another hour for any potential complications that may arise from online submission, which a lot of students ended up using as extra time for answering the paper. Nonetheless, many complained of having to make use of the very last minute to finish the paper, if ever.
This summer, exams in many departments, including that of Economics, were conducted in person, which meant as students, we were confronted with an even bigger challenge than in January. And frankly, as someone who takes Economics modules myself, I walked out of the exam room feeling disheartened. I had spent all the possible time that I had to revise for exams, only for them to deal a crushing blow to my already shaky mental health during the exam season. The stringent time constraint put us in a position where we barely had much time to think through the questions, which were evidently harder than those in the papers from pre-pandemic. To give you a rough idea: we were having to answer ten-mark questions in under 6 minutes. The more you spend on a question, the less time you have to answer the rest of the paper – the extra 2 or 3 minutes really add up for an exam like this. All of which got me thinking… What are these exams really for? What skills are they training us for? What good do they do, when their sole purpose seems to be to narrow down the percentage of people getting a 1st or a 2.1, reiterating the bespoken prestige of a LSE Economics degree?
I have heard recurring complaints from students of different departments, especially of Maths and Finance that this year, the exams had been unusually and unreasonably tough. This comes as most of us face the first in-person exam in years, some of us, the first years and some second years, having not done a single in-person exam since GCSEs.
Yes, I suppose “normality” has been restored – it has become once again “difficult” to obtain a “good” grade in a LSE Economics exam, or rather it’s become even more difficult. The percentage of students receiving a 1st or a 2.1 this summer in EC201 is 32%, compared to 75% in 2021. But at what cost? At the cost of failing a stark 18% of the cohort. The logic of clamping down grade inflation to maintain the quality of an Economics degree at LSE is genuinely understandable in my opinion. Especially when it is meant to reward those who really have put in the hours. Yet, the length many professors took to raise the difficulty of, for many, the first ever in-person exam at university, appears excessive. Haven’t they overcompensated? How many students’ mental health hit rock bottom with the excruciating exam preparation period and the exams themselves? And why has “LSE Stressed” (an Instagram page that accumulated 193 confessions from LSE students from 9 April to 3 June) taken off in this particular exam season? Most importantly, was all of that necessary to educate a generation of ambitious, intelligent and cultivated young people?
Instead of offering more support and trying to understand students’ perspective, the university has been more focused on recovering their statistics. I question the necessity in stretching a significant portion of the student body (to say the least) to their breaking point during an exam season. It should not have been like this. And I hope this does not go on. I hope at our university, known for the quality of education, exams will again be written to test the depth of our understanding and not with other ulterior motives that ultimately undermine students’ wellbeing.
