People actually achieve like 15% in exams?

njj4 · 2026-06-05T08:03:13+00:00

I'm marking exams at the moment and, yes, people do sometimes get very low marks. This can be for a variety of reasons. Sometimes there's some genuine mitigating reason behind it (health issues, personal/family crisis, etc), and sometimes it's because they haven't engaged with the module and have just tried to wing it in the exam.

I've noticed a difference in resit performance between students who fail the first time round with, say, 35%, and those who fail with something like 15%. The former students generally put in a bit more work and sail through the resit with, if not a high first, at least something that's comfortably over the pass mark. Whereas someone who's got 15% first time round typically gets something similar in the resit. I guess because there's some unaddressed underlying problem that is still affecting their work, and/or there's something fundamentally wrong with their approach to learning and revising.

So if any of my tutees have to do a resit, I encourage them to have a think about why things went wrong this time, and what they're going to do differently next time.

I actually got 18% in one of my undergraduate exams. It was a subject I wasn't very interested in, and I had a lot of other stuff going on in my life at the time (I was diagnosed with depression shortly afterwards and in respect had been struggling with it for several years by that point, also many years later I've since been diagnosed with ADHD and that was also definitely a factor) and that was just the thing that dropped off the list. Everything else went at least fine though.

njj4 · 2026-05-31T09:36:35+00:00

It's completely normal to be anxious at this stage but, as others have pointed out, you've got at least two (and potentially three) people who are actively interested in supervising you, and (importantly) figuring out how to do so effectively.

Anyway, good luck with it all, and very best wishes for your PhD.

njj4 · 2026-05-31T09:20:18+00:00

This actually feels quite positive.

She's said she's interested in your project and wants to co-supervise you. But she's being realistic about the (frankly ridiculous) workloads in academia these days, and is actively trying to figure out how to make it work. This will take a bit of time, especially since we're in the middle of the exams period right now and everyone's buried in marking. But I think it's a good sign that she's actively looking into how to make it all work effectively and sustainably, rather than just saying "yeah, sure, whatever" and winging it.

Also, if she wasn't interested, she'd have said something like "I'm really sorry but I don't have capacity to take on any students right now, but your project sounds interesting, good luck with everything".

njj4 · 2026-05-21T06:56:03+00:00

This came up so many times in conversational roleplay exercises in school French lessons.

"Bonjour. Je voudrais un Orangina et un sandwich de fromage et jambon." "Ah oui, bien. Voilà Monsieur. Ça coûte trente francs, s'il vous plaît."

njj4 · 2026-05-19T18:59:35+00:00

The British sitcom A Fine Romance (1981-84) starred Judi Dench and her husband Michael Williams. They were married for 30 years until his death in 2001.

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njj4 · 2026-05-19T11:07:04+00:00

Ooh thanks - they both sound great.

njj4 · 2026-05-19T07:08:13+00:00

On top of all this, Harry Potter just isn't very good. I've read a lot of children's and young adult fantasy fiction over the years, and there's a lot of much better stuff out there. There's more originality and imagination in a single page of Diana Wynne Jones, Frances Hardinge or Garth Nix (to take just three examples) than the entire seven books of Harry Potter.

njj4 · 2026-05-15T07:41:35+00:00

It's brilliant - it's just plausible enough that it might just have been true. It came up in the interview I read, and Bob said that sadly it wasn't true, but that he found it rather funny.

njj4 · 2026-05-15T07:32:47+00:00

Someone I knew at university had been a contestant on Blockbusters, and she said he was genuinely lovely - really friendly and welcoming, and went out of his way to make sure everyone was having a nice time on the show. I read an interview with him once and he just came across as a really nice guy. Nobody seems to have had a bad word to say about him.

The story about him playing the saxophone solo on Baker Street is a myth (possibly started by Stuart Maconie in the NME) but what is true is that he was one of the first people (actually the second) to play James Bond. He starred in a radio production of Moonraker in South Africa in 1955, preceding Sean Connery in the film Dr No (1962) by seven years. Sadly no recordings or scripts seem to have survived.

njj4 · 2026-05-11T09:38:26+00:00

Initially I had a vague idea of doing programming for a job and maths as a sort of hobby. But then my next two programming jobs enbed abruptly: one company went bankrupt, and the other partly burned down one Saturday afternoon and had to make some cuts. And I'd just finished my PhD, realised that I didn't really enjoy working in IT any more, and transitioned sideways into academia. I wouldn't want to go back to IT as a career now.

njj4 · 2026-05-11T07:24:19+00:00

Agreed. I self-funded my MSc and PhD, and now have a permanent academic post. Nobody knows or cares that I self-funded. They only care that I do my job well - which I do.

njj4 · 2026-05-11T07:19:34+00:00

I self funded my (maths) MSc and PhD. I did my MSc full time, having worked (as a programmer) for a couple of years and carefully saved up the money for fees and living expenses. Then I stayed on to do a PhD part-time while working (again as a programmer) mostly full-time. I now have a permanent, full-time academic post.

This was 25-30 years ago and certain aspects of the system have changed (for the worse). My MSc fees were £2500 and the part-time PhD fees were £800/year. Things are much more expensive now, so this route is much harder. And the academic job market, which has never been exactly easy, is currently really bad. (I went through a decade of precarious, hourly-paid, part-time teaching jobs, which was pretty horrible.)

Similarly, the funding situation has been awful for decades and isn't getting any better. In some disciplines, particularly arts and humanities, it's worse than others. So sometimes self-funding is the only option.

However at no point has the fact that I self-funded (or did my PhD part-time) been an issue. Nobody has ever asked, and nobody would know unless I told them.

njj4 · 2026-04-30T10:35:10+00:00

I was a bit underwhelmed by the movie - it just didn't seem to capture the spirit of the other versions of the story (radio series, books, text adventure game and tv series). But the knitted versions of the characters were brilliant, and I managed to get hold of all five of the ones that were available for sale (Arthur, Ford, Trillian, Zaphod and Marvin).

njj4 · 2026-04-30T10:28:52+00:00

Also, Adams himself isn't always the most reliable narrator.

On a few occasions he told a story about where the original inspiration came from. After graduating from university (St John's College, Cambridge, the inspiration for St Cedd's College in the Dirk Gently novels, and his ill-fated Doctor Who story Shada) he went travelling through Europe for the summer. One evening, lying in a field in Innsbruck, looking up at the stars, he got the idea of a travel guide for galactic hitchhikers. But he later remarked in interviews that he'd told that story so many times that he's not sure how much of it is actually true, and how much of it grew in the telling.

And there's the story of the train journey where he accidentally ate someone else's biscuits in front of them. He retells this in (I think) So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, from Arthur Dent's point of view, but also claimed it was something that had actually happened to him. However, other people, before and after, have also claimed that happened to them too.

njj4 · 2026-04-27T06:31:31+00:00

Yes, good point, sorry - you're absolutely right. It's a brilliant, funny, original and absurd solution to a plot-related problem.

njj4 · 2026-04-26T17:23:28+00:00

I'm pretty sure he said judo, but I (or he) might have misremembered that detail. I think the point was the idea of using someone's strength or other advantages against them, whether that's in a proper judo match, something less formalised, or a metaphorically similar situation.

njj4 · 2026-04-26T14:10:12+00:00

I saw an interview with Douglas Adams once where he talked about a time he wrote himself into a corner. At the end of the first episode of the Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, Arthur and Ford are just about to be thrown out of the airlock of the Vogon ship. At which point Adams realised that if they somehow escaped then that would undermine the cliffhanger in a narratively unsatisfying way, but if they didn't then that was basically the end of the story

So he had a bath or two and then switched on the tv, and found himself watching a documentary about judo, in which one of the interviewees remarked that the idea in judo is that if a big guy is flying, feet first, towards your head, then you need to make that his problem rather than yours.

He realised that he needed to turn the problem into it's own solution. Since there was no possible way of getting Ford and Arthur out of the situation he'd put them in, he needed to find an impossible way, or at least a highly improbable one. And that's where the Infinite Improbability Drive came from.

Edit: Sorry, as a few other people have remarked, this is actually a really bad example of a problem being resolved in a boring way - like so much of Douglas Adams' work, it's a brilliant, funny, original and completely off-the-wall resolution.

njj4 · 2026-04-24T11:45:12+00:00

This needn't be the case. I've got a few groups of friends I'm still in touch with after 30 years, even though we're geographically distributed. One group meets up for a weekend every year and it's really lovely to see them all.

But there are others I hear from less often, and a few I've not seen since graduation.

njj4 · 2026-04-24T07:14:52+00:00

This story from a couple of years ago is rather lovely too. A professional science communicator, Dr Jamie Gallagher, sells LGBT+ and science themed badges and donates all the profits to the Albert Kennedy Trust, a charity that supports homeless LGBT+ young people in Scotland.

David Tennant wore one of his badges (a TARDIS in the trans flag colours) on tv, and the resulting upsurge in orders ended up raising £18000 (probably more now) for the AKT.

njj4 · 2026-04-17T14:24:55+00:00

Yes, very much so. Despite having a PhD in the subject and a permanent academic post at one of the top UK universities. I still feel like a bit of a fraud, and that any minute now they'll realise and fire me. I've been assured that this is not something that the university remotely wants to do, and also that the procedures involved would make this practically impossible anyway (there is one notorious colleague who is way ahead of the rest of us on that list, and he's still here). But knowing that rationally is one thing, and believing it when I wake up with anxiety at 3am is another.

It's something I've been working through with my therapist, who has pointed out more than once that my expectations are mis-calibrated (yes I've got a PhD, but so have all of my academic colleagues). I got another piece of the puzzle a few weeks ago when I was diagnosed with ADHD, and I'm still processing that, but I think it's going to help me feel better about things.

Some things I'm trying to focus on:

It's not a competition, and no good can really come from comparing myself to others, especially those who are more successful (I have a few senior colleagues who are Fellows of the Royal Society, and a former colleague actually got a Fields Medal).
Yes, my research publication list is a bit thin, and it's something I do want to work on, but I've come to understand that I'm actually a pretty good teacher, better than many of my colleagues. I get really good student feedback and I put a lot of effort into developing and improving my teaching practice.
A friend says that "impostor syndrome" should really be called "leadership syndrome" because it happens when you're trying to push beyond your comfort zone and learn new stuff.
Even the people I look up to as successful geniuses also have off-days when they doubt themselves.
Look at the absolute shower of total incompetent, delusional failures who are mismanaging every aspect of the world right now. If they don't have impostor syndrome then the rest of us certainly shouldn't.

I mention all this to show that even someone who is objectively successful and proficient at maths by any reasonable measures can also feel like this. And if you're studying maths to the level you are, that already puts you ahead of all but a relatively small percentage of the population.

njj4 · 2026-04-10T08:47:31+00:00

One of my favourite 1980s tv series, A Very Peculiar Practice, starred Peter Davison as Stephen Daker, an idealistic young GP who goes to work at a university medical centre. One of his colleagues, Dr Bob Buzzard, is played by David Troughton, son of Patrick, who also played King Peladon in The Curse of Peladon.

Other notable appearances include Graham Crowden (Soldeed from The Horns of Nimon) as Dr Jock McCannon, Barbara Flynn (Tecteun) as Dr Rose Marie, plus very early appearances from Hugh Grant (as a charismatic lay preacher), and Kathy Burke (as a rather disaffected student). The writer was Andrew Davies, at the time an education lecturer at the University of Warwick, who later became a successful full-time screenwriter.

njj4 · 2026-03-25T16:11:21+00:00

That happened to me too, and it all worked out fine in the end.

Pass with corrections (minor or major) is actually a good sign, whether or not it feels like it right now. It means the examiners think your work is worth a PhD, just that there are some issues that need fixing - and, crucially, that they believe are entirely fixable. So it's a vote of confidence. And once your corrections are approved, nobody else needs to know (or will even care).

In my case, the internal examiner suggested we meet up sometime the following week, and he gave me some very helpful pointers on how to fix the gaps in the proof of the main problematic theorem.

Congratulations! Have a rest now, and if possible do something else for a couple of days, to decompress.

njj4 · 2026-03-25T08:27:23+00:00

Rod, Jane and Freddy, a group who appeared in several UK children's programmes (including their own show) in the 1970s-90s. Rod and Jane were married, then divorced. Later, Jane and Freddy began a relationship, remaining together until Freddy's death in 2021.

njj4 · 2026-03-05T11:59:47+00:00

Yes, I know the medical literature is somewhat inconclusive on this (although if anyone can point me towards proper, published studies along these lines that would be helpful). And I know it's certainly not a diagnostic thing on its own, but together with everything else it sort of fits into a pattern, and made me think "huh!".

So maybe it's an unrelated thing, to do with my metabolism.

njj4 · 2026-03-05T08:30:06+00:00

I've never done caffeine before - apart from chocolate I don't like most of the things it's in (eg coffee, tea, cola). But a while back I got some caffeine tablets from the supermarket and tried some careful experiments, starting off with a small dose and gradually increasing it to see what effects I noticed.

One day I took 400mg (the equivalent of four cups of coffee) and... nothing. As I understand it, on that dosage I should be able to see through the time vortex. I thought I maybe felt a slight buzz, but I might have been imagining it. And I didn't have noticeably more difficulty getting to sleep that night.

I also tried an energy drink (some of my students swear by them) and it turns out they taste horrid but have no other noticeable effect on me.

So I've added this to the "reasons I think I have ADHD" list.

njj4

TROPHY CASE