“I never want to take an exam again!” Several of my OU AL colleagues, talking about possible further study, recently said they too were never going to take another exam, but would take courses without exams.

“And you’ve got a PhD!” exclaimed by tae kwon do friend. She could not understand how I could fail a recent tae kwon do Dan theory paper. But I also failed my 11+ (“not fail, just selected for another school” assured my mother), English ‘A’ level (got an ‘O’ level pass) and three or four other courses.

A tae kwon do theory paper and a PhD require different knowledge assessments, and different skills to pass. A PhD is a marathon that requires persistence, tenacity, determination. You need those attributes to manage your supervisors (thinking herding Siamese cats), agree research questions, acquire data, read very very widely. You need to learn skills to analyse data, and to report your results and conclusions. You need writing skills to produce a cohesive argument in a thesis of 70-100,000 words – the length of a novel. A PhD requires a three-year determined effort on top of previous years of work at a lower level (actually the same as you need to get to black belt practical standard in a martial art). And you need to start with knowledge in your own area, well beyond ‘O’ level, so you can assess other people’s work in that area before arguing for your own research.

Those skills are totally different from a 24 hour memorisation of a Korean general’s interpretation from a Buddhist or Confucian perspective of patterns, with no logic, just what the general said they were, and a rote learning of some Korean terms for which you don’t even know how to form the plural. If you don’t memorise, then it’s easy to fail. But is it learning? When a black belt tells you, “You can’t expect me to remember that. It’s three years since I took the theory paper!” he proves it is not learning.