DR Janet Brown suggests (“Handwritten school exams will be phased out in the next 10 years, says SQA chief”, The Herald, December 8) that handwritten/paper-based examinations will soon disappear, presumably with handwriting replaced by typing via a keyboard.

This shows an ignorance of the unique difficulties this would present for the examination of mathematics (and other mathematical sciences).

There are two major difficulties for non-handwritten presentation of that subject. Mathematics is rich in, indeed overflows with, symbols that are not represented, for the most part, by keys on a standard keyboard. Thus examination answers would be required to be encoded, as in the standard software for typesetting mathematics.

This is a fairly esoteric and time-consuming skill which would be a distraction and extra burden to place upon school students to learn when the primary educational objective is comprehension of the rather challenging subject matter itself. Furthermore, it is not easy to peruse this encoding to check, as one can easily do with handwritten text for errors or omissions.

Decoding such encoded text into readable (paperless?) typed text (by student or examiner is not clear) for ease of assessment requires extra software and appropriate hardware.

An equal difficulty arises as regards rough sketches and diagrams commonplace in mathematical presentation. Again, one requires sophisticated drawing software to be able to handle this, a further complicated and time-consuming distraction from the matter of displaying mathematical understanding and skill in examination.

Darrell Desbrow,

Overholm, Dalbeattie,

Kircudbrightshire.

WHAT makes further education lecturers special (“Fears for students as 9% pay rise imposed on colleges”, The Herald, December 6)? Their job is less dangerous or onerous than the nursing profession, fire service or police. I can say this with some certainty as a retired lecturer. I also worked in the private sector as a training manager.

It was only when I returned to FE that I realised how much less onerous a lecturer’s lot was. FE lectures do outstanding work and vocational education deserves a much-needed boost since there has been far too much focus recently on university education. However, considering striking after a nine per cent pay award is beyond the pale.

Their job should be put into perspective with a primary or secondary school teacher. I know that paperwork has grown exponentially since my time in FE but much more out-of-hours work is required by school teachers and discipline problems in FE bear little resemblance to the problems faced daily by a secondary school teacher. Few FE lecturers are likely to be subjected to abuse or violence.

They should think themselves lucky to be awarded nine per and, relative to the rest of the population, have an above average holiday allowance.

Ian Smith,

111 Dutch House, Kilmarnock Road,

Monkton.