The horror of exams

Isn’t this horrible?

Are there any of you, I wonder, who do not know the horror of exams? I rather doubt it. At some time in everybody’s life someone decides to see if they know something - not that anybody knows anything or, if they do, they never show it.

This is a very good example of exam handwriting - the worse ever - because this, like all exam answers, is being written against time. If you look carefully at the paper on the other page you will see agonised notes written in an attempt to assist a fast-failing intelligence. Isn’t it awful?

When we think of the pure unadulterated nonsense that we wrote down in that period of time, we despair of our older universities altogether. We begin to wonder what examiners won’t swallow: they seem to have digestions like ostriches.

Still, never mind, if we get lured into an academic career, we may be payed out with our own coin and have to correct just such another set of papers. It would serve us right!

So now we know Lorna's opinions of the exams that she was forced to take in 1932. This essay is another artefact that we found pasted into the family scrap book that we introduced on 10th January.