So it’s natural that you don’t get as good work as someone who is full time when you only work a few days a week. But as you say, there’s definitely still meaningful stuff you can do – no need to be stuck in precedents…

Totally agree that the time measure is totally inadequate to understanding costs – far too crude, and doesn’t reflect the intellectual effort that goes into doing a particular task. Or the complexity of the task.

A general manager at a big firm told me (as a timesheet recalcitrant) that the time recording was most important to understand costs. Which is crap because the measure is too crude.

I think it might have been a harvard crit who wrote it…

This – not the lovely sandstone or ‘interesting’ dress or port after supper – is the real indicator of privilege.

Here’s my bet. Most law faculties in Australia use multiple choice exams, so get used to it! No-one says they’re the best thing (far from it), but once you have huge numbers of students you end up using them because they’re quick to run and they differentiate between students well. In fact, you can get whole degrees and answer nothing more than multiple choice questions on exams these days (including the social sciences!). My suggestion is to ditch exams altogether once it has got this stage, but everyone expects to have to do exams, no matter how little they learn from them (students, accrediting organizations, most staff). Where I work, students complain if they have to do anything more than multiple choice on exams now, and because of this and teaching evaluations, written answers have pretty much gone they way of the dodo.