The Cambridge Chat Thread - it's over 90,000!

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I don't think the Squire is particularly awe-inspiring. Then again, I've practically lived in the same spot for 3 years so maybe it's fallen off me now (I knew I'd spent too long going there when one of the librarians decided to chat to me. During the conversation, she mentioned she'd wanted to talk to me because she's gotten so used to seeing me over the last 2.5 years, she felt she should. However, she was a very lovely person )

Surely by "wonders of the Law Library" he means that it's awe-inspiring rather than "wonderful"?

(I suspect it's because, for some reason, economists have been having lectures in our Fac, so he's finally had a look around.)

Nevertheless, I'd be interested to hear some of your poetry.

Oooooh... *winces*

Mind you, even using images doesn't always enhance a story. There was one about the sex attacker a few months back, and part of an email from Pembroke's Senior Tutor was quoted. The paper (The Telegraph?) used a photo of Pembroke College, Oxford.

The thing as a whole is still too much pitched at the top thirty or forty percent of people, from the difficulty of the example sheets to the way the exams don't provide a particularly good divison of thirds from lower seconds, or even lower from upper seconds, but somehow manage to rank the top twenty people pretty clearly. /rant

*applauds* I'm an economist but I can see from the mathmos that the course is clearly directed way above the level it should be... Also, if it takes five minutes to explain the scoring system, your exam marking is either too complicated or some kind of game show.

However, it is true, as Mr Dactyl aptly noted, that the Maths tripos fails to cater for anyone 'in the bottom third' of the class list. This is an outrageous shame, because the very vast majority of those people are very clever, have proven to be so during their interviews and admissions tests (STEP) and would have achieved at least a 2.1 if they had gone elsewhere. (I realise that this is quite a bold statement, but I'm quite confident in it: Apart from those who lost the motivation to do maths at some point during their degree, every Cambridge mathmo would get a 2.1 at least at most other universities.)

I always use Cambridge mathmos as my example when I explain to people that marks here can be unfair, and Cambridge can disadvantage some people. I think its the most obvious example of exceptional people being punished for being at the bottom end of the best minds in the country/world.

PRSOM.
I'm sure it happens in other subjects as well, but Maths is probably the most pronounced and most easily quantifiable example.
Sure, the maths department insists on giving out a high number of firsts (justifiably so, imho), but they also insist on giving out 25-30% 2.ii's. Now I don't know what the percentage of people getting 2.ii's in Maths is like in other places, but I can't imagine it to be much higher. Hence, in terms of the marking, the system ranks the bottom third of Cambridge mathmos the same as the bottom third of Uni X (no names to not cause offense) mathmos.
The old 'yeah, but you have a Cam degree, surely that counts for something' argument doesn't hold up either - for many of the things that people might want to do after uni, getting a 2.i is a 'tick the box' requirement which can't be circumvented through special consideration.

I disagree partly: The problem with the scoring system is NOT the complexity (it is essentially just: We'll put this on some kind of curve which heavily incentivises fewer complete answers over more incomplete ones. It's just that mathmos would never be happy about this description and so the procedure has been formalized and made public).

It makes me sick that for many people getting a good degree from a worse university is a better career move than coming to Cambridge.

PRSOM to the both of you.
And it's how you can get around that. Different scoring system? This is especially true now you're dealing with online applications which simply filter out anyone without a 2:1. It's really hard to comfort friends who've just ended up with a 2:2, but are phenomenal mathematicians by any standard, and how being in the bottom third of the top 1% of mathematicians in the country can lead to you being worse off than someone who's much less talented or diligent. That's hard for me to reckon with and I imagine it's a hundred times harder for them.

On the other hand, no-one at the national level is prepared to admit that a Cambridge degree is fundamentally different from a degree from whichever other uni you care to name, and I think the difference is biggest by far in Maths. You can't fix it until you can agree that degrees are different and there's not really a national standard..

Sick? I think there are far worse issues in the world to waste your energy on.

True, but not many are likely to be as relevant.

Relevant to who?
Forgive me, but my heart isn't breaking for the screwed over Tabs in the world.

Ditto this. It worries me a fair amount that if I get a 2.ii (which is looking more and more likely ) a fair amount of job applications I submit won't ever be looked at. It's difficult to say if I think my degree is harder than the same degree at a different university, as I've only ever done this one, but I do seem to think I'd be on at least 2.i somewhere else. I quite liked the idea of further study after undergrad, too, but that's never happening now.

I love Cambridge, but it is pretty upsetting sometimes. At least it's week 8 now.

As a side note to the grades discussion, how many of you would have chosen to go elsewhere because you think you would have been able to get a better grade?

Had I gone to a different university I may well have had a better chance of getting a first (although I wouldn't necessarily make that assumption as I've never actually been to a different university and I don't know precisely how much standards differ). However, even if that were the case I still wouldn't swap going to Cambridge. I met some guys from other well respected universities when I was on my year abroad and we chatted a bit about what Russian literature we'd studied - they essentially did one book or one author per term in their second year, whereas at that point I had already read a wide variety of novels, short stories and poetry from 1865 until the present day. Even though they'd studied Dostoevskii in detail and I'd only done two or three supervisions on a few of his stories (and read some novels in my spare time), I could still hold my own in a discussion with them about his works. It's Cambridge that has given me the combination of a really broad framework and the opportunity for in depth discussion in the supervisions, and has taught me how to think (not in a prescriptive way, but the actual act of thinking) and how to discuss. I don't think I would have been self-motivated enough to give myself that if I had been somewhere else. However, I think that is somewhat easier for me to say, partly because I was never at university in order to get myself into the job market (university has always been pretty much the apex of my ambitions) and partly because I'm doing an arts subject in which about four people per year get lower than a 2.i in Part II.