Amr Shalakany medidates on the exam dread -- and the law There they were again, all 6,000 of them, waiting at their desks for exam papers to arrive -- and that was only a small fraction. Scary as the thought may be, there are 32,000 or so of them scattered all across the city, jammed into depressively painted examination halls at maximum capacity. I speak of law students, of whom there are no less than 32,000 at Cairo University alone. This is not a typo, either. And you know what? Most of them didn't want to be such in the first place. I'm not sure I want to be an assistant professor at Cairo University's Faculty of Law, either -- a role in which I'm expected to "proctor" at examinations. What this implies, in practice, is two weeks of walking up and down the isles separating exam desks -- with a stern look on my face. But the students have their own faces, and the looks they give me turn the process into a farce. The same every day: mid-way through the exam, you begin to notice a vacant stare gradually descending on faces, eyes glazing over, bodies becoming fidgety. And then the passive-aggressive stream of questions. There will always be girls who want to go to the bathroom, boys who want to smoke -- or pray -- and lunatics who claim to require immediate medical attention. Others will suddenly discover that they forgot their ruler, misplaced their pencil, used up the ink in their pen. Always, the excuse solicits cross- room conversation; one can only conclude that the examinees are suffering from boredom. That, as any LE1's worth of analyst will tell you, is not a primary emotion: to be bored on the surface means you're seething with repressed anger deep down. Most students don't know the answers to whatever legal question they have before of them; they want to cheat, they can't, they get angry -- so they start looking bored. They sulk, they mope, they brood. They huff and puff -- they wheeze. By which stage I'm equally bored (for which, read "angry"). To proctor law exams is to perform an absurdist play. Between staring coldly at one student who won't stop talking and reprimanding another for sharing her ruler, one can't help asking what on earth we're all doing here. Did these students want to study law in the first place? Most are here because their thanawiya amma (secondary education diploma) exam results gave them no other choice. The newly opened English section -- no more than 500 out of 32,000, though -- may be something of an exception. And do law professors want such phenomenal numbers of students to teach? They are simply powerless when it comes to admissions. The same scenario is played out every year: the dean asks for a certain (low) number of students, the Ministry of Higher Education counters with triple that number, and right there and then you have 8,000 first-year students. But is anybody engaging in anything educational beyond memorisation? Most students are academically inept and existentially disinterested. With an average of 3,000 students per lecture hall, how can you be pedagogically constructive? Webster's Dictionary defines "absurd" as, among other things, "ridiculously senseless", "contrary to all reason or common sense", "laughably foolish". How about a picture of Cairo University's Faculty of Law for an alternative definition? Students who don't want to study, professors who don't want to teach them, rote learning that leads to either a fail or a pass that might as well have been one -- and then either unemployment or employment outside the law -- plus enough state funds to maintain a campus, hold exams and grade them. All of which are the wrong thoughts to have while you proctor an exam, mind you. And maybe this is why I fantasise instead -- about going on strike. Junior faculty will no longer teach until the government reduces student numbers. This fantasy collapses when I remember that none of the national universities are financially or politically independent. How about positive thinking, then? There are students among those who really want to study; and the faculty has qualified many a great lawyer, judge and scholar. This too collapses when I remember that the system places the faculty at the very bottom of the hard-to-get-into pyramid. And it occurs to me that I haven't been paying enough attention to spot cheating. Why, why do I have to do this?
