It is the time of year when we hard working professors and lecturers set examination questions for our undergraduates. Well actually they were set some weeks ago to allow for time consuming administrative procedures to kick into action. I would like to ask whether it is possible to set a humorous exam question?
A colleague once set a question (in Oxford of course) where he described an alloy oxbridgium with light blue and dark blue phases. This did not go down well and the students complained that the examiners were not taking their task seriously.
However, when I did my undergraduate course there was a three hour essay question that often set questions such as. “I shoot the Hippopotamus with bullets made of platinum, because if I use the leaden one his hide is sure to flatten em”, discuss – well I did do metallurgy.
Now my memory (selective of course) is that we found these questions humorous rather than offending our sensibilities. So can we use humour in exams? Is it ethical and are these questions really funny when you read the question in an examination?
I think physics has great scope for wry humour.
“For a perfectly spherical cow in a vacuum subject to a magnetic field of 0.3 Tesla, calculate…”
You could get complaints if someone is thrown out of an exam because they are laughing so hard at the question.
Anyone teaching physicists might like to ask What grade are you likely to get when the examiner uses this grading system?
Lecturers in the Genetics Ddepartment at the University of Leeds were positively encouraged to set humorous examination questions. I remember having to devise a program to breed white elephants for some eastern potentate. I expect the PC brigade wouldn’t allow such things nowadays. Sigh.
Of course we have to distinguish between a real question that tests understanding of science but is dressed up to amuse (e.g. the Oxbrigium example I gave), and a question which is designed to sound amusing but is nonsense (e.g. Explain why a superconducting aeroplane can only fly due magnetic north).
We got the genetics of hairiness in hobbit’s feet in one exam, a few years after Henry.
This does make me wonder – are hobbit’s feet hairier than the backs of Drosophila?
I (whilst at Manchester) encountered humorous examination questions – generally it was welcome light relief though they did occasionally make one waste valuable time wondering about the examiner setting the more laboured examples…
As for hobbits vs Drosophila, I’d have thought that Drosophila would win out on hairs per square unit…are we taking length or mass of the hair into comparison?