Yes, many years ago, even I did GCSEs. I was in the second year ever to do the new General Certificate of Secondary Education, as it was then. In 1989, I did GCSEs in Mathematics and French, and the following year I did further GCSEs in English, English Literature, Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Latin, Greek, History and Electronics. I got straight As, as A* had not been introduced yet obviously. And why does this matter now? I had to type them all up for my unsuccessful training contract applications this year.
The GCSE was not the pinnacle of my own educational journey, though I did very much enjoy them. I wouldn’t say my Bachelor of Medicine or Bachelor of Surgery, Master of Business Administration, Bachelor of Law, Master of Law were either. I am proud of having passed PRINCE2, and the Diploma of the Membership of the Royal Colleges of Physicians (UK), but even now memories of these do not set me on fire.
I would say my Ph.D. was the pinnacle though, awarded from the University of Cambridge in 2001. This was awarded after a 20 minute viva examining a very short thesis of a few experimental chapters on a novel way to diagnose early onset dementia. I think coursework at GCSE was a good introduction for me for doing research, although I do not share in Gove’s criticism of the use of the internet in learning. Knowing which information is relevant and which is irrelevant is a highly prized skill, and I feel that people who are much younger than me, who are able to see the wood from the trees, are at an advantage. For partly this reason, I think the GCE Advanced level is a useless exam – this is a terrible fact dump of the highest calibre, and, although it was pivotal for me to go to Cambridge, I really have no idea how I would cope with the intense pressure of UCAS now in 2012. Anyway, for somebody who is obsessed with “academic rigour”, I am a bit surprised that Michael Gove did not wish to go onto to a Ph.D., but in fairness to him it is difficult to obtain funding for a non-sciences Ph.D. (his undergraduate degree was English) – or a D.Phil. as it is known in a few places including Oxford – directly from a II.1; he would have had to have done a Masters degree, which he did not do to the best of my knowledge.
I obtained the second highest First in Finals in Cambridge in 1996, as a result of writing twelve one-hour essays. I do not share in Michael Gove’s enthusiasm in bringing the three-hour exit exam as the sole measure of success in the e-Bac, but I have to say, when I came to assessing Natural Sciences Tripos finals in physiology in the early 2000s (for one year only), I awarded Class I to those people who could argue well and structure an essay well; people who received the Upper Second, I found, knew a lot, but simply could not produce a coherent introduction or conclusion.
My MBA taught me that collaboration in teamwork was excellent in advancing valuable skills, such as communication and negotiation. I think these are to be much valued in whatever you do professionally. I do not see how Michael Gove’s e-Bac will necessarily achieve this. I came top in innovation management, in a course at BPP Business School led by Dr Vidal Kumar, and indeed I am an advocate of ‘the adjacent possible’ philosophy of Stephen Kauffman (or “the Medici Effect” in another guise), where you learn to make unusual connections across many disparate fields to produce ‘the next innovation’.
I loved my Master of Law, but this again was very focused to a rigorous detailed look at commercial law, but developing skills such as making commercial pitches and completing successfully case analysis. I had to do a dissertation for this, where it was necessary to pose the right questions, present your introduction, methods, results and discussion, in the right order, and I hope that I took the field further in cloud computing. This is maybe what Michael Gove would call ‘coursework’, but I suppose he has had limited experience of this nature of academic enquiry, above his undergraduate degree at Oxford, not being impolite.
I haven’t lectured, though I have supervised at Cambridge. You’ll understand that I am a professional student, though I haven’t set up any educational departments, courses or establishments. But, as a ‘user’ of the educational establishment, starting with my election as a Queen’s Scholar at Westminster in 1987 (an examination which Prof Stephen Hawking even proudly boasts he nearly sat), may I politely suggest that Michael Gove is barking mad?
