Do the students of today generally have weaker bladders than the students of the past?
I go past one of our main examination halls several times a day, and it is rare for me to do so without passing a yellow-tee-shirted invigilator escorting a student to or from a 'call of nature'. (I'm assuming that everything is in place to ensure that these visits are not to consult the internet behind the closed door of a cubicle, or to look up formulae previously inscribed on an otherwise hidden part of the body.) Sometimes there are two invigilators working together, one escorting students to and from the hall and the other standing guard outside the facility outside the lavatory.
In my own finals exams we had ten 3 hour exam papers. We had two on Thursday (morning and afternoon), two on Friday (the same pattern), and two on Saturday. They gave us Sunday off, and then we had two papers on Monday and two on Tuesday. I don't remember anyone ever leaving the hall to visit the lavatory (and note that those exams were longer than most we set today). The one exception was the Saturday afternoon exam. Quite a few of us had been to the pub for lunch that day, and had enjoyed a drink (or two) before returning for the 2.30 exam. The result was a steady stream (perhaps that isn't the right word) of people requesting accompaniment to the necessary facilities. As these were quite a long way from the exam hall, and there were only two invigilators (who were also the examiners) present this created something of a backlog of people getting noticeably increasingly desperate as they waited their turn.
Two obvious reasons for change in these practices over the last few years are, firstly, the greater intake of coffee, and secondly the way in which everyone now carries their bottle of water into exams. Whilst we might have drunk coffee before our exams (and I didn't) we certainly weren't allowed to take water in.
But I posed the question at the head of this blog to a very recent student. His response was that students today are just not used to sitting still for more than an hour. The only way to be able to move around is to request a trip to the lavatory - even if there is no biological need.
So perhaps it's not weaker bladders that today's students have, it's less tolerance of physical inactivity (along with the bottles of water).
I go past one of our main examination halls several times a day, and it is rare for me to do so without passing a yellow-tee-shirted invigilator escorting a student to or from a 'call of nature'. (I'm assuming that everything is in place to ensure that these visits are not to consult the internet behind the closed door of a cubicle, or to look up formulae previously inscribed on an otherwise hidden part of the body.) Sometimes there are two invigilators working together, one escorting students to and from the hall and the other standing guard outside the facility outside the lavatory.
In my own finals exams we had ten 3 hour exam papers. We had two on Thursday (morning and afternoon), two on Friday (the same pattern), and two on Saturday. They gave us Sunday off, and then we had two papers on Monday and two on Tuesday. I don't remember anyone ever leaving the hall to visit the lavatory (and note that those exams were longer than most we set today). The one exception was the Saturday afternoon exam. Quite a few of us had been to the pub for lunch that day, and had enjoyed a drink (or two) before returning for the 2.30 exam. The result was a steady stream (perhaps that isn't the right word) of people requesting accompaniment to the necessary facilities. As these were quite a long way from the exam hall, and there were only two invigilators (who were also the examiners) present this created something of a backlog of people getting noticeably increasingly desperate as they waited their turn.
Two obvious reasons for change in these practices over the last few years are, firstly, the greater intake of coffee, and secondly the way in which everyone now carries their bottle of water into exams. Whilst we might have drunk coffee before our exams (and I didn't) we certainly weren't allowed to take water in.
But I posed the question at the head of this blog to a very recent student. His response was that students today are just not used to sitting still for more than an hour. The only way to be able to move around is to request a trip to the lavatory - even if there is no biological need.
So perhaps it's not weaker bladders that today's students have, it's less tolerance of physical inactivity (along with the bottles of water).
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