After wowing South America with my pasta-related repartee on Radio Columbia (live from Bogotà ) in 2003, I have at last been picked up by the British media, and made my UK radio debut this morning. A nice lady phoned me up on Friday to check the blurb, and I pointed out a few minor errors, but the original version has gone up on the website anyhow. It's probably not her fault. I listened to myself for a little bit; I'm surprised I sound like that.
My main grumble is that today I got a letter informing me that for my examining this summer I am to be paid £55 before tax. Now, £55 (minus tax) is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick; I can't dispute that. But what I did for those fifty-five Great British Pounds was: set by myself an entire final-year exam paper, with twelve essay questions and a complex gobbet question with images and texts in Latin and Old English with translations; turn up in my gown to start the exam and stay within contact during it (I started another one too but that was as a favour to a friend); mark ten exam scripts of the same paper, with all the attendant agonising over half-marks; mark five third-year undergraduate dissertations on various subjects at the outer limits of my knowledge; reconcile marks with second markers. (I ducked out of the examiners' meetings since my attendance wasn't mandatory.) This series of tasks (not at all part of either of my jobs) took a lot of time; drew very heavily on my knowledge of various highly-specialised subjects; and involved also a big emotional effort -- these were young people's finals marks, after all. I used to earn the same amount of money in a Sunday afternoon on the tills at Marks and Spencer's.
Monday 20 August 2007
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Shocking, isn't it -- one year I was paid 260 pounds for examining, for doing what I calculated was around 150 hours' work, including paper setting, meetings, . Which at my reckoning is just slightly less than one pound eighty per hour. So much for the minimum wage! However, my faculty doubled the payment this year (which is still not much) and there are movements afoot, under threat of general mutiny, to try to convince the university to pay more. So it might be worth raising this with your department administrator -- as it's essentially part of the same faculty. (If anyone was to think it's unreasonable that non-UTOs should ask for higher payments for examining than they currently get, one might muse upon the fact that, in my faculty at least, examining counts as one-seventh of a yearly employment stint, thus "costing" the faculty the equivalent of over 5,000 pounds per UTO examiner. Compared with that, a payment to a non-UTO of 260 (or even 520) pounds for the same work is so negligible it's quite ridiculous!!
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