tim's experiment

Heartbreaking article the other week about examination stress. Apparently since the Diploma of Secondary Education came into full flowering in 2012 about 71 students in the relevant age group have eluded the examiners by killing themselves.

The writer, who still had fresh memories of passing the ordeal herself, thought this was shocking, and so do I.

It is always difficult to be sure of the motives of people who commit suicide, and there is a tendency for one reported case to inspire imitation. Even so, I remember the days when a toll of one or two suicides in an examination season was considered bad news. We are now, it seems, running a rate of something over ten a year.

The writer noted that the DSE, compared with other similar exercises, lacks continuous assessment. That is to say your final score depends entirely on the two weeks of frantic writing at the end of the course. There is no credit for school work done earlier.

She also noted that in Hong Kong the DSE was practically the only input used by universities in admissions decision-making. That, I can confirm, is certainly the case.

When four-year degrees arrived the committee of university heads decided (this was not a necessary feature of the new system) to abandon the old arrangement by which a course selected its own students. In future admission would be by faculty or school.

This means that anyone working on admissions is faced with a crowd of thousands from whom they have to pick a hundred or two. No detailed consideration is possible. The exam score is effectively all there is. The only other indicator of any interest is the student’s choice.

I remember several attempts to float scoring systems for extra-curricular activities, with bonus points ranging from – say – one for doing a Red Cross flag day up to ten for an Olympic medal. None of these came out as very convincing and I don’t think anyone is using one now.

There is also the familiar point that a university degree means less now than it did in the days when it was a rarity. The unfortunate consequence of this is that employers who really do not need people with a university degree still use it as a way of reducing their pool of applicants to a manageable size. If you haven’t got one your application is rejected out of hand.

This leads to the suspicion that – as one of Michael Moore’s interviewees puts it in “Bowling for Columbine” – if you don’t graduate you will die poor and lonely. Your future – not to mention your parents’ happiness – is at stake in the DSE and failure to meet expectations is a major personal catastrophe.

I do not, I must say, remember similar angst over the corresponding examinations through which I plodded many years ago. The writing was all done in two or three weeks – continuous assessment had not been invented – and we had to do the whole thing twice (it was called O and A Levels).

It may be that as a sort of supergeek for whom examinations came easily I missed symptoms of tension in my classmates. But there is not much privacy in a boarding school.

Then maybe we were let of the hook by the 11 plus. This was an exam (which was supposed to be a mere “IQ test”) taken at the end of primary education. It may have caused some stress, but most of us were too young to take it that seriously, and at least the stress did not coincide with teenage turmoil.

Those who took the exam were then allocated either to Grammar Schools (this outcome was familiarly described as “passed”) or to Secondary Modern Schools, which were noticeably less affluent and prestigious (“failed”). There was supposed to be a third category of Technical Schools for the NCOs of industry, but few of these actually appeared.

Everyone in my school had, by definition, “passed” the 11 plus. So we may subconsciously have thought that we already had Business Class tickets for the 747 of life. Getting into university was still very unusual. For most of us it was hoped for but not expected.

Perhaps, raised on the stories of our parents’ privations in World War Two, we set the bar for complaints a bit higher than it is set now. Employers, anyway, rarely insisted on a degree. Many professions which now require a degree, including the Law and journalism, still admitted most of their recruits fresh from school.

This absence of stress at school was more than compensated by a surplus at university. The one I attended offered an idyllic existence for three years. You then had a week of “Finals” which was rather reminiscent of that legendary Chinese examination in which candidates for the civil service were shut up in a room for a week and told to write down all they knew.

We had six hours of exams on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, Sunday off, six hours on Monday and a last burst on Tuesday morning, after which there was an understandable tendency for the exhausted examinee to get resoundingly drunk.

An oddity I noticed on arrival was that all student rooms had brand new electric fires. This was because the university had decreed, after a spate of student suicides using gas, that all gas fires should be replaced with something less obviously lethal.  This was a success. Nobody killed him or herself while I was there. Some people continued to get special dispensation to take their Finals in the local mental hospital.

In small colleges there was constant vigilance. I remember the Dean of my place, seeing me sitting on the steps of a church (I was waiting for a friend) drew disturbing conclusions about my state of mind. He stopped his car in the middle of the street, ignored the ensuing hoots of outrage from other motorists and ran across to ask if I was alright.

At the University of London I heard of an odious arrangement in some of the more sought-after science programmes. They would admit about 20 per cent more students to the first year than they had places for in the laboratory subjects which started in the second. At the end of the first year the bottom 20 per cent in the pecking order were simply expelled. The results of this can be imagined.

One of my first attempts at journalism was a column in a student publication at the University of Lancaster drawing attention to two recent attempts at suicide (both, fortunately, half-hearted and unsuccessful) and wondering if exam stress could be reduced as this seemed to be a cause.

I then got a polite hand-written letter from the Vice Chancellor saying that he was willing to try anything, but reducing the significance of exams appeared to be not so much a way of reducing stress as a way of spreading it over a longer period.

We discussed the matter further and agreed that a student counselling service was a good idea. As I was the student union president at the time this proposal was sure of a favourable wind from several directions and materialised rather quickly. I do not know if it helped.

And this gets us back to where we started. Yes, the DSE is a stressful experience which some victims do not survive. But what would help?

I suppose there is no practical objection to spreading the exams over, say, four weeks instead of two. Would that reduce stress or spread it out?

Using continuous assessment of school work is a big ask because it puts teachers in a complicated situation. How much help is permissible; how much benevolent marking do their pastoral obligations require?

It seems also that while the student whose continuous assessment is successful can comfort himself with the thought that he enters the exam room with some money in the bank, as it were, the student who is less successful in term time may find the exam an even more onerous and frightening ordeal than if he was allowed to start from scratch.

Counselling can help, and a lot of people now offer it. I fear those who most need it are the least likely to ask.

The unlikely reform which I think would help is giving more thought to the idea that the entire student population should take the same exam. The consequence of this is a large group of candidates entering the examination room knowing that their chances of passing are minimal or non-existent.

A further large group in the same boat may not realise this until they see the actual questions. When I took the French Oral exam (a one-to-one chat with visiting examiner) we were admitted in alphabetical order. The first person out was besieged by an eager crowd asking what the examiner had wanted to talk about. Unfortunately this boy was not a strong candidate. “I don’t know,” he said, “she was talking in a foreign language.”

Seriously, though, the business of preparing people for an arbitrary and unnecessary encounter with failure is gratuitously cruel. There may be something in the idea that those who aspire to life’s glittering prizes should be willing to suck it up and tough it out on occasion.

The rest of us do not need to be prepared for a seat at the back of the bus. Life will provide us with as many examples of failure and rejection as a sane person needs. We do not need an extra dollop from the education system.

Read Full Post »

Thought-provoking piece the other day in what we Standard-bearers used to call The Other Newspaper. Headline (for which the writer is of course not responsible) seemed to be having trouble making its mind up. It said “Yes, it’s legal, but that doesn’t make it right: Hong Kong’s ‘can-do’ spirit has been twisted.”

This is interesting, indeed the first part of it is an important point which bears repetition any time: what is legal and what is right are two different things. Hong Kong’s can-do spirit, on the other hand, generally means overcoming obstacles by ingenuity and hard work. I am not sure how, or whether, that connects with doing whatever you like, a rather different matter.

Continuing to what we print dinosaurs used to call the second deck of the headline we were told that the author “Luisa Tam argues that merely following the law is not enough in our society – there is no legislation to guide us on how to be a Good Samaritan.”

Indeed there isn’t, and this is a problem. One of the more robust findings of experimental psychology is that, given a situation where help is needed but other people are also in a position to supply it, something between 60 and 75 per cent of us will leave the heavy lifting to the other people.

And this seems to be what Ms Tam wished to talk about. Indeed by the end of the piece it is what she is talking about: “For individuals, there is no law to guide people to be a Good Samaritan. The fact that we are not legally obligated to do good deeds or behave admirably towards others doesn’t mean we should stand idly by and do nothing when help is needed, or behave in such a way that benefits no one but ourselves.”

With which I hope many readers will agree. What puzzled me about the piece was what happened in between.

Pieces lamenting declining moral standards are a respectable form of journalism drawing on a long tradition which can be traced back through General Booth and Savonarola to the Elder Cato. During my lifetime I have seen many variations on this complaint, with moral decay attributed to American comics, rock and roll, sex, the pill, the decline of religion, the deplorable example set by politicians generally and Mrs Thatcher in particular, cheaper booze, easier divorce, outsourcing, investment bankers, video games, pagers, mobile phones, and Facebook, to name a few.

The success of this kind of writing depends on the specific examples given. Nobody is going to be interested in, or persuaded by, bare appeals to abstract principle. The horror story is the heart of the story.

Well we are offered two, and both of them seem to have problems. One concerns an employer who wanted to curtail his workers’ entitlement to compassionate leave in family crises. Well shame on him. As a sidelight on contemporary mores, though, it had two disadvantages: the employer was eventually talked out of it, and the whole incident took place 20 years ago.

This brings us to Ms Tam’s other example, in which she is a victim. Ms Tam apparently drives an electric car, and was outraged to find, in a public car park, that someone had parked an ordinary petrol-driven vehicle in one of the spaces fitted out with a charging gadget for chariots like hers.

Indeed Ms Tam sees “almost every day” charging stations occupied by non-electric vehicles and this is because they are often “non-reserved spaces”.

Which raises an interesting ethical/legal question, though perhaps not the one the writer intended. If a space is a non-reserved space, and spaces are in short supply, why should a driver seeking a space not park in it, whether his car is electric or not?

If someone can afford to spend half a million bucks on a car (I note without comment that journalism seems to have become more lucrative than it was when I was a full-time practitioner) then perhaps he or she should be expected to make arrangements for feeding it which do not involve depending on specialised spaces in public car parks.

Indeed I am a bit puzzled by this enthusiasm for putting power points in public car parks. The manufacturers of electric cars now maintain that the range of these creatures is comparable to that of their petrol-drinking counterparts. So why should they expect or need a quick top-up while the boss is doing the shopping?

We have never, after all, had petrol pumps in car parks. And I fancy that requests from drivers with retro tastes for hitching rails and horse-watering troughs will not be entertained.

Ms Tam says she “confronted a woman with a baby on the back seat of her car” who was occupying a charging space. The woman replied that it was not a reserved space. Ms Tam responded with “But it’s not very nice, is it?” Not very nice? Some of us would have been tempted to answer that in terms not fit for a baby’s ears.

The pity of it is that there are plenty of examples of morally questionable goings on in Hong Kong if you want to explore present values, without getting involved in the hardships of millionaires driving technically exotic cars.

Indeed the best thing in Ms Tam’s article was a link to an excellent piece, also by her, about the disgraceful treatment of domestic helpers in Hong Kong.

There is a story by Hans Christian Anderson of a princess who established her royal status by being able to feel through a pile of mattresses that there was a pea on the bed. This is not recommended as an inspiration for journalism.

Read Full Post »

When Sarah Bernhardt came to London for the first time in 1879 she starred in a play called Medea, a bloodthirsty melodrama inspired by the story of a mythical Ancient Greek queen who, betrayed by her husband, killed his new wife and her own children by him.

Asked by a reporter what she thought of the performance a member of the audience said that it was “so unlike the home life of our own dear Queen!”

I had a rather similar reaction when, browsing the internet’s obscurer pastures, I came across Judge Frank Caprio. His Honour is the staple diet of an unusual television programme, sample here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORc0xXiJNd0  which follows his work as a rather humble judicial functionary, dealing mainly with minor traffic violations and occasional remands in custody.

There have been notoriously humane and gentle magistrates in Hong Kong, but the general trend runs more to the 17^th century precedent which (recorded in the mixture of French and English which lawyers were affecting at the time) went like this: the prisoner “ject un Brickbat a le dit Justice que narrowly mist. & pur ceo immediately fuit Indictment drawn by Noy envers le prisoner, & son dexter manus ampute & fix al Gibbet sur que luy mesme immediately hange in presence de Court”.

Judges have the undisputed right to exercise considerable power in keeping order in their own courtrooms. The relevant offence is known as “contempt in the face of the court”. Offenders can be fined and jailed in a most summary manner. It is a feature of Hong Kong courtrooms that this power is exercised with very little thought to its potential drawbacks.

In a case last week, for example, the judge took exception to the fact that a member of the public in the accommodation reserved for such people was wearing a scarf with a political slogan on it, which the judge took as a violation of an earlier order from her that there should be no displaying of banners or slogans.

Reports of this incident have as usual been sketchy. I hope there was something missing in the report that had the hapless defendant, a 62-year-old local lady, trying to explain herself and being told that her guilt had already been decided, the only point at issue was the sentence.

Well the case was adjourned and so must be considered to be still active. So we should not consider its merits in detail, or at all.

Some general points arise, however. The first is that, as the UK Law Reform Commission put it, “if … the procedure by which the court seeks to impose its authority lacks the basic features of justice which apply to criminal proceedings, then it undermines rather than enhances the rule of law.”

Or as an English judge put it when invited to exercise these powers: “When a judge deals summarily with an alleged contempt he may at once be a victim of the contempt, a witness to it, the prosecutor who decides that action is required and the judge who determines the matter in dispute and imposes punishment.”

Clearly this does not inspire a great deal of confidence. More seriously from the English legal point of view it is generally recognised that, as a recent commentator put it: “there are concerns that the summary enquiry procedure, although swift and robust, does not comply with the requirements of article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights.”

Article 6 is the one that concerns fair trials. It does not, of course, apply in Hong Kong. However the Bill of Rights Ordinance does, and it stipulates in language strikingly similar to that of the Convention that anyone accused of a crime should have the right:

• to be informed promptly and in detail in a language which he understands of the nature and cause of the charge against him;
• to have adequate time and facilities for the preparation of his defence and to communicate with counsel of his own choosing;
• to be tried without undue delay;
• to be tried in his presence, and to defend himself in person or through legal assistance of his own choosing; to be informed, if he does not have legal assistance, of this right; and to have legal assistance assigned to him, in any case where the interests of justice so require, and without payment by him in any such case if he does not have sufficient means to pay for it.

In other words you have a right to a detailed explanation of the charge, time to think about it, and a lawyer, if necessary at the public expense, before the judge consigns you to the nearest dungeon.

Hong Kong judges might care to consider the relevant Practice Direction for English judges exercising their “great power”. They should:

  Tell the respondent of the possible penalty that the respondent faces;

  inform the respondent in detail, and preferably in writing, of the actions and behaviour of the respondent which have given rise to the committal application;

  if the judge considers that an apology would remove the need for the committal application, tell the respondent;

  have regard to the need for the respondent to be –

• allowed a reasonable time for responding to the committal application, including, if necessary, preparing a defence;
• made aware of the possible availability of criminal legal aid and how to contact the Legal Aid Agency;
• given the opportunity, if unrepresented, to obtain legal advice;
• if unable to understand English, allowed to make arrangements, seeking the court’s assistance if necessary, for an interpreter to attend the hearing; and
• brought back before the court for the committal application to be heard within a reasonable time;

  allow the respondent an opportunity to –

• apologise to the court;
• explain the respondent’s actions and behaviour; and
• if the contempt is proved, to address the court on the penalty to be imposed on the respondent; and

  where appropriate, nominate a suitable person to give the respondent the information.

It used to be a requirement that the judge considering a summary conviction of this kind should refer the matter to another judge who was not already involved in the case. Judges have more recently taken the view that this is not always necessary and may involve unnecessary delay. Still, where an adjournment is required anyway judges might consider a recent observation from the UK Court of Appeal:

“…the power to impose summary punishment for actions which one has oneself witnessed and is oneself the victim does appear to place the judge in the position of being witness, prosecutor and judge… In many cases where there has perforce to be a delay between the alleged contempt and the summary trial, it will be wise for the judge to refer the matter to one of her colleagues if for no other reason than to avoid the risk that this argument will be run.”

Having urged judges to be more circumspect in the use of their power to convict for contempt in the face of the court I must express some puzzlement at the apparent complacency over the matter of people taking pictures in court.

This has always been a notorious no-no for news purposes. The possibility of tourists taking pictures for their own amusement has not previously come up. This suggests that in the two recent cases in which “tourists” from the mainland were caught taking pictures of the jury and in one case uploading the results onto the internet, something more than mere curiosity was involved.

So it is disturbing that the perpetrators were released without penalty and without, apparently, any serious inquiry as to whether they were who they said they were, or were doing what they said they were doing.

We must all sympathise with the judge who thought a procession of celebrites appearing in the part of the public gallery reserved for Donald Tsang’s friends and family might influence the jury. The answer to this problem is to abandon the practice of reserving seats in the public gallery for the rich and famous. A seat for the defendant’s wife is reasonable; a court hearing is not a social occasion.

A jury may perhaps be influenced by a parade of harmless local bigwigs. Possibly not in the intended direction. It can surely be terrified by the discovery that pictures of members are being taken in circumstances which suggest that such pictures may end up in the files of the Secret Police of our northern neighbour.

Yet this does not seem to bother judges at all.

Read Full Post »

It is impossible to write anything about what happens in America without being accused of some nefarious bias. It is almost as bad as writing about Israel. So let me start with a little story.

When I was about six weeks old I was taken to Westminster Cathedral to be baptised. This sounds rather a grand place to be baptised, but my father was working there as the assistant organist at the time so I suppose this was a perk.

The event was intended to be a tandem christening – I have a twin brother – and our uncle Philip was going to be godfather to both of us. At the last minute the officiating priest announced that it was against the rules for both of us to have the same godfather. No other men were present except my father, who then ran outside in search of a man — any man — who would be willing to stand in at no notice as my godfather.

The man who answered the call on the pavement outside was an American serviceman by the name of Floyd Puckett, who was still in London having done his bit in the licking of Hitler. In honour of his kindness I was given his name as my middle one. So I am reminded of the American gift for spontaneous generosity every time I look at my full name.

Having said which, you guys are crazy about guns. Have you noticed, by the way, that while “mankind” has been outlawed as a bit of male chauvinism, “guys” has become a perfectly acceptable downmarket replacement for “people” even though in its original usage it meant men. In “Guys and Dolls” the women are the dolls.

But I digress. Guns. The latest school massacre brought bubbling to the top of my Youtube feed some things I had not realised were going on before.

Many American schools now hold an “active shooter drill” about as often as they hold a fire drill. In an active shooter drill you rehearse procedure for shots being fired in your school.

The teacher is supposed to lock the classroom door, block the window in it, if there is one, and usher you all to the far side of the room. This does not actually guarantee safety. The high-powered rifle sported by serious active shooters will put a bullet straight through the door and anyone who is cringing on the far side of the room behind it. But at least he has to guess.

The problem with this is that the active shooter drill is the converse of the fire drill. In case of fire you are to leave the building as quickly as possible. In the active shooter incident this is a possibly fatal mistake. In the latest case the active shooter took advantage of this by setting off the fire alarm before he started, thereby creating what might in less lethal circumstances be considered an interesting dilemma.

A more developed variation on the “active shooter drill” is the “active shooter exercise”, a dress rehearsal for the local police force. This has teenagers splattered with stage blood playing dead in the school corridors while cops in full SWAT gear stride over them in search of a culprit.

I find all this quite shocking, to be honest. Nothing at all like this went on in the rural grammar school where I passed my high school years. The depths of Sussex are quiet. But is there another country in the world where schoolchildren are prepared as a matter of course for the arrival of a deranged gunman in the hall?

Watching this buzz-cut Pasionaria tearing verbal lumps out of her local politicians through a veil of tears – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxD3o-9H1lY – I felt the distant internal disturbance of a few long-neglected memory cells climbing reluctantly to their feet.

After a few days I remembered that when I was roughly her age, I also participated in a school protest. This was against the Cuban missile crisis, which is now a distant piece of history for most people but at the time was seasoned with the knowledge that if it all want pear-shaped we on the wrong side of the Atlantic would get four minutes warning of the arrival of Russian missiles.

Of course this was in a sense not so personal. We had not lost friends . But I think there is a common underlying theme. If adults are going to exhort us to plan and work and sacrifice for the future then they have an obligation to ensure with some degree of certainty that there will be a future and we will be in it. Otherwise what is the point?

Well it would be an abuse of language to imply that America’s schools are a war zone, despite the President’s appalling suggestion that the answer to the active shooter problem is to arm teachers. Florida is not Syria.

But then you look at calm collections of the facts like this one: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/21/17028930/gun-violence-us-statistics-charts – from which I purloined the following chart:

Javier Zarracina/Vox

And the interesting additional snippet that according to CNN, “The US makes up less than 5% of the world’s population, but holds 31% of global mass shooters.”

You then have to conclude that America’s gun laws are crazy. Then you will be told that it is none of your business, that you don’t understand American culture, and the right to bear arms is protected in the Constitution, so that is that.

Well it is none of our business. But then the way things are in Hong Kong is none of your business. Generally we both enjoy the right to comment, subject only to the hope that the comment will be well-intentioned.

This is not really a cultural matter. The obdurate fact is that international comparisons show very clearly the incidence of gun violence in a country is directly proportionate to the number of guns in circulation. If you have on average more than one gun per person then the levels of gun violence will be stunningly high. There is nothing cultural about this. The workings of cause and effect are obvious.

I understand people who find guns exciting and interesting, as I do myself. But if this thought leads to the conclusion that everyone should have one then it’s a killer.

As for the Constitution, well, nothing is perfect. Amendments can be amended. Laws can be changed. Numbers can be reduced. Lives can be saved. And until, that happens I am afraid overseas observers will look at your beautiful country, shake their heads, and say, “wonderful place … nice people … pity about the gun thing.”

Read Full Post »