I've been neglecting the blog recently and I apologise to everyone, especially the regulars (you know who you are!) There'll be more neglect until work settles down. With any luck (certainly not with planning), this will happen next week.

All sorts of things have been occurring at work. Of course, I can't blog about any of it, which is unfortunate because much of it is very bloggable—in that Victor Meldrew 'I don't believe it' sort of way. Anybody who's spent time back-of-house at an academic institution will know what I'm talking about. Ivory towers, my arse.

The students have been providing a few of those Meldrew moments. They've received their results and are now elated, appalled, bamboozled or all three. One of them sent me an e-mail today (which I had to fish out of the junk e-mail folder because the subject line was completely uninformative) demanding to know why he had got less than 40% when he'd done so well in his laboratory classes and exam. I'm rather surprised by this myself. Not by his final mark but how he'd determined that he'd done so well in the exam when I haven't released the exam mark. (I triple checked his results and, quite frankly, he was lucky to get that high a score. Now, how to put that diplomatically ...)

Still, no one did anything quite as silly as one of last year's students who marked his own exam, worked out what he'd scored for each question and added them up for me. He was, as you might expect, not very accurate. (He did pass with a respectable mark.)

Back soon with stuff.