How I learned to stop worrying and love Standard Credit

It is important to remark that the entire British education system places enormous emphasis on final exams, and Cambridge is no exception; indeed, it helped to create this system. A grade average over the whole academic year, which plays a role, as far as I am aware, in the Czech and American education systems, is unheard of in the UK. The first year of the Engineering course at Cambridge is scored out of 900 marks. 200 of these come from each of the four exams at the end of the year: mechanical engineering, structural mechanics, electrical engineering and mathematics. Those practicals, reports and projects, which take up so much time over the whole school year, represent only the remaining hundred marks; they are much less significant. However, all students are expected to get these hundred marks; the only reason we are awarded marks for coursework is apparently so that we do it at all.

This is true not only at universities, but at schools. A typical English school student faces three important exams: the 11+ entrance exam to secondary school, the GCSE in 7-11 subjects at the age of 16, and the A-Level in 3-4 subjects at 18 (this is an example and by far not the only possible scenario). This term, as part of the STIMILUS programme, which another grantee has already written about (https://www.kellnerfoundation.cz/univerzity/nasi-stipendiste/tomas-deingruber/detail/stimulus), I am tutoring pupils at a local school who are preparing for their GCSE in mathematics. They have two years left until their exams, but, when I come to the classroom, it seems like two days: there is much more advice on exam technique on the walls than tables or equations. (A very remote inspiration for this article was the recent statement by England’s chief school inspector Amanda Spielman that this emphasis on exam results is hurting British education, and that the inspectorate Ofsted, which has enormous influence on schools, will start assessing the quality of schools differently. But I digress.)

The Standard Credit system also exists because practical work is unpredictable. It can happen that an experiment just doesn’t work, perhaps because of faulty electrical components or spoilt chemicals. It wouldn’t be fair to deduct marks for this. A similar system (practical assessment) exists for A-Level exams in physics and chemistry: to pass the final exam, I needed confirmation from my teacher that I had done certain practicals, but the results of the practicals themselves were not assessed in any way.

Another reason is that it enables students to take risks. One of the bigger projects in the first year is the design and construction of a steel bridge (or cantilever, or other structure) which must bear a certain load. If marks were deducted for failure to carry this load, students would be afraid to take risks, all the bridges would be designed and built in exactly the same way, and nobody would learn anything. I have heard that, at universities in the United States, an analogous system called Pass/Fail exists, under which some subjects have no grades except “passed” and “failed” and are not included in the grade point average; the purpose of this is to enable students to try subjects unrelated to their degree.

(To be precise, marks are deducted for failure to carry the load, but if a student gains more than a critical number of marks, the coursework is considered completed and receives full marks. This means that it is possible to compensate for a bad bridge with a good report on its flaws, or even to make up for being late to a practical with an excellent report on it.)

Some students don’t like the fact that Standard Credit does not reward outstanding work in any way and therefore doesn’t motivate students to work hard. However, that is its entire purpose. The course is time-consuming and the Engineering Department wants us to spend our valuable time revising theory, not endlessly editing reports. It has also happened at least twice already that some sponsor of the Department has offered a monetary reward for the best project (e.g. the best Lego robot). For those who really want to put their time into projects, it can pay off in this way, but those who would rather revise theory don’t lose anything from it.

The Standard Credit system is, as far as I know, unique at Cambridge: it does not exist on any other course except Engineering, and even in Engineering it exists only during the first two years of the course; I suppose that the coursework in third and fourth year is closer to real work an engineer might do, and therefore becomes more important. Standard Credit is such a defining feature of the course that it has already entered our slang: “standard credit” as an adjective means “below average” or “poor”; “to go for standard credit” means “to deliberately put in the bare minimum of effort”, and so on.

Essentially, the Department wants us to do our coursework, but doesn’t want to rank us by it. That is because, to be frank, nobody is interested in whether I write a good essay on the subject of “the engineer in society” (yes, this is a compulsory module in first year), but I should nevertheless be able to do it. The Department ranks us by the results of traditional exams on theoretical subjects, and what matters in those is theoretical knowledge and, more importantly, thorough preparation – those things that really matter at university.