My friend Robert Adams, who has died aged 76, spent most of his working life as a researcher and statistician for examination boards. However, his colleagues will remember him as much for his wit, sociability, wide reading and intellectual curiosity as for his undoubted expertise in statistical analysis.
Born in Nuneaton in Warwickshire, Bob was the middle of the three sons of Geoffrey Adams, a quantity surveyor, and Winifred (nee Eling), a housewife. He attended King Edward VI grammar school in the town, then took a mathematics degree at Woolwich Polytechnic (later Thames Polytechnic and now University of Greenwich) in south-east London, followed by a postgraduate diploma in statistics in 1968 at the University of Kent. There he met Pat Birks, and they married in 1970.
Bob returned to Woolwich Polytechnic to lecture in what he referred to as “hard sums”, before moving to the research department at the Associated Examining Board in Aldershot, Hampshire, in 1977.
Formative work with John Wilmut and others on approaches to grade awarding and the rank ordering of candidates led, in 1981, to a three-year posting with his young family to Mauritius, where he was a visiting fellow at the Mauritius Institute of Education, evaluating the country’s secondary school entrance examination system.
Soon after returning to the UK he took up the post of research officer at WJEC, the examination board for Wales, in Cardiff in 1986. During the following decade sweeping changes to examinations – including the introduction of GCSEs, modular A-levels and the new AS-level – meant his expertise was in great demand.
Bob’s empathic approach to the varying demands of different subjects endeared him to colleagues, and surely derived from his wide-ranging interests – particularly music and literature.
He was a chorister from the age of seven, and from 1968 onwards his rich baritone was much in demand in amateur choirs. Thirteen years as a lay clerk in Llandaff Cathedral choir brought him back to the Anglican choral repertoire he loved, while founding the Kenneth Stoat Singers provided secular outlets for more singing and also cricket, often enlivened by rough Somerset cider.
But his love of words manifested itself in a fund of often self-deprecating stories and the production of clerihews, limericks and parodies, which he shared occasionally under the nom de plume of Hieronymus Stoat. A keen crossword solver, he would surprise you in formal meetings by producing a series of anagrams of speakers’ names.
In 2006 Bob moved to London to the educational publisher NFER Nelson, before returning to exam board work at Guildford in Surrey, the AEB by this time having become part of the Assessments and Qualifications Alliance, now AQA. In retirement he took up the saxophone and sang with the Welsh Camerata.
He is survived by Pat, their daughters, Jenny, Judy and Alison, six grandchildren and his younger brother, David.
