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The release of A level results last week, and GCSE results this week, have finally broken the relative calm of the summer academic holiday. Pupils who, I hope, had managed to put exams to the back of their minds inevitably find their anxiety levels rising as Thursday morning approaches. University tutors hope for the best news but prepare for the painful conversations and difficult decision making that comes with the worst. Families and school teachers wait and watch and worry. The middle of August has become, for me, a time when the spring which has been winding down begins to wind up. There are moments when it is difficult to escape the message, which I’ll borrow from the fifth chapter of the book of Daniel, “Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting". Measurements are being taken, of academic performance, of academic judgement, of personal resilience, of the justice of procedures and systems and we face the results with trepidation. There is an element of fatalism to it; as in Daniel 5 the writing is already on the wall and we all must brace for the tide of consequences about to overwhelm us. It is, therefore, a comfort to me to remember a related strand of biblical thought, which is the inadequacy of human wisdom and judgement in the face of the wisdom of God, who does not measure on human scales or judge by human standards. I wish all the very best to those students who have received their examination results this month but I hope that I, as well as they, might keep this in proportion; remembering the radically different measurements made by God, who makes foolish the wisdom of the world.
Dr Mary Marshall
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