Oxford exams reveal ‘disdainful’ attitudes

OXFORD history students have been accused of treating social groups with “patronising disdain” after referring to the North as “backward” and the Irish as “tribal” in exams.

Professors complained that students’ answers on British social history during the Early Modern period were “remarkably bad”.

History dons said that answers on the role of women “produced some bad answers”, including essays which “implied that the only women with any agency were those who became queens regnant”.

Examiners went on to note that some regions and social groups were treated with “rather patronising disdain”, which included references to Ireland as “tribal” and to the North as “backward” or “up north”.

Oxford students have campaigned in recent years to make degrees and reading lists more “inclusive” by featuring more female and black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) voices.

Earlier this year, the university’s vice-chancellor Prof Louise Richardson said that many departments in social sciences had “begun work on making their curriculum more inclusive and adding diverse voices to it”.

She went on to explain: “This includes steps such as integrating race and gender questions into topics, embedding teaching on colonialism and empire into courses, changing reading lists to ensure substantial representation of a diverse range of voices, and ensuring better coverage of issues concerning the global South in syllabuses.”

The professors expressed regret that, of the students who took a paper in medieval Christendom and its neighbours, just 13 chose to write essays on women, men or gender.

“The overwhelming majority of essays, that is, the other 185, barely mentioned women,” examiners said. They warned that this should “worry everyone teaching the paper and everyone taking the paper”. The remarks were made in examiner reports last summer.