This is causality

There is a legend among Oxford students, where degrees and honours are determined by a final examination of 6-8 3-hour exams in the final year summer.

In science subjects there are typically 8-12 questions and the students will try to finish as many as possible. But complete answer of about 3 questions would probably give you an "alpha" grade as each question carries a full score of 25 and this score will be squared (3x625=1875, vs 10 questions of 10 scores each scoring 10x100=1000). Therefore, the "top first" would score as many as 5000 in a paper (for a rare "alpha plus" score) while to get alpha you only need to score 2000.

In humanity subject, the paper quite often is a single essay on a very concisely phrased question/issue. To illustrate the paper and the how the scores are determined we have this legend

• Question: "What is risk?" (I do not know what the subject is, probably philosophy or literature, or economic!. It is just an un-verifiable legend anyway)
• A student went in, answered with three words, left the examination hall and got an alpha
• His full essay for the 3 hour exam? "This is risk."

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In HK it is unlikely that this will happen, as we know. There is no trust/mutual-respect in our education system for this. The student would not dare the risk and the professor will assume the student is unruly. But I think Mr Lam Kay would score an alpha in this

• "What is causality?"
• 看看唐英年怎麼說吧:"當彭定康拍拍籮柚走左去之後，香港人就衰足七年"；林忌加一句"當董建華拍拍籮柚走左去之後，香港人就好足三年!"
• a) Henry Tang, "When Chris Patten left HK, he left HK to suffer for 7 years" b) Lam Kay's corollary, "When Tong Chee Hwa left his position, he left HK to prosper for 3 years" -- This is causality!

To spray salt on his wounded feet, I would also like to add these

• When Tung's father passed away and left OOIL (Oriental Overseas), it went bankrupt
• When Tung left OOIL, OOIL stock price shot to the sky between the period of 1997-2004

This "Folk-Guy" had some track record but nobody I knew agreed with me when I talked about that 10 years ago. sigh...