SENIOR TUTOR’S REPORT Dr Penny Barton
8 ANNUAL REVIEW COLLEGE NEWS
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021 was another year of strange and shifting landscapes for academic institutions. We had a very difficult term in Michaelmas 2020, with the whole of West House being isolated by Public Health England after a COVID outbreak in the block, but we waved off our students in December 2020 expecting them back in January to something more like normal. Sadly that didn’t happen, and we all went into the big second lockdown over the Christmas period. This led to extensive correspondence with students who did or didn’t want to come back into residence, some in dire and serious need to be living and studying somewhere other than their family home, and others just thinking it might be more fun to be in Cambridge. All teaching was online throughout Lent 2021, and as always some students coped with everything more or less unscathed, whilst others gradually began to slip out of our grasp. By the time we got to the Easter vacation we were allowed to have students back in College for a broader range of reasons, and there was a general gradual return. Everything was kept quite low key through the Easter term – most meals were takeaways and very few social events were possible. Students were pretty much focused onsite for a long term of revising and then exams – for the second year running almost no exams took place in conventional exam halls. Different Faculties experimented with a number of different assessment formats, and a number of lessons were learnt. For instance if you tell a student they can do their open book exam any time in a 24 hour period (to allow for students in other time zones), but are not recommended to spend more than
three hours on it, then it turns out that many students will work continuously for 24 hours and keel over as a result – especially if another 24 hour period begins immediately afterwards. Sadly the main graduation ceremony, General Admission 2021, had to happen without guests in College or in the Senate House, but as some exam results were late some students had a later ceremony with limited College guests. By September we were able to have a couple of
