This is a long email, but, I hope, illuminating. It's very difficult to resist the temptation to launch a personal attack on Frank Shute---not least of all because he has no reservations about such behaviour himself. Amusingly, his name appears in quotes whenever it pops up in my mailbox and I am beginning to wonder if 'Frank Shute' is a sort of Alf Garnett of the SuSE-Linux-Schools list, created as a front to troll the mild and reasonable into a frenzy. Oh! for a Slashdot-style moderation system. I am going to give 'Frank Shute' the benefit of the doubt, anyway, and try to concentrate on the points rather than the person. It's easier to separate arguments from an individual when the arguments have been so overused and are so divorced from reality that they already have lives of their own.
That's my point too! They're taking students they really shouldn't be taking because a decree has gone out that 50% of people should go to university. So irrespective of the individual merit of an applicant, university's are feeling compelled into dropping standards to fill what is by any stretch of the imagination a bogus quota dreamed up by some think-tank.
This presupposes a wondrous past age when universities admitted students solely on the basis of merit. University entry is a great deal more meritocratic than it has been for a long time. (It's a shame our state secondary education system has simultaneously adopted a system of selection on the basis of house price, thought this has happened by default and is another argument entirely.) It was only relatively recently that UK higher education institutions were obliged to publish objective admission standards. When my dad attended university in the late fifties/early sixties only a small fraction of the population were admitted. Back then a degree was a prize for the elite, yet there were still a significant number of admissions made on arbitrary criteria---old school tie anyone? Unfortunately this class-based elite gave the idea of elitism a bad name. It's an irritating feature of Cambridge life that the railway station has only one proper platform. This was ordered by the university when the station was built to ensure that the "young gentlemen" could be observed by the university authorities and prevented from avoiding lectures. Today you need 5 grade As at 'A' level, grade 8 piano and a gold Duke of Edinburgh award just to get a sniff of the place. (I exaggerate, but only slightly---I had lunch with an geography don at St Catharine's a couple of months ago who confessed in hushed tones she had let someone in with a 'B' once.) Back then most of the students probably had nice titles and wardrobes put precious little of substance to be proud of---though possession of a penis was, of course, an essential prerequisite for entry. There's nothing wrong with saying that "all shall have prizes" (or even "50% shall have prizes") as long as the outside world has a clear sense of the relative "worth" of those prizes---I think we might agree that a degree from Cambridge is possibly more valued in the graduate jobs market than one from Anglia Polytechnic University---and the advertised admissions criteria for each institution vary accordingly.
Whatever, that is not the real point. The thing is that these students get
access to the courses otherwise quite a few university lecturers are out of a job.
As I indicated, I don't really care. Why give people jobs if they aren't worthwhile?
If people are happy to pay for their children to obtain "bogus" degrees, why not let them do so? Our universities educate more people to a higher standard and more cheaply than most equivalent continental institutions and our "worthless" lecturers generate more and better publications from their research than most of their European counterparts at a fraction of the cost. Check out the results of the last Research Assessment Exercise for a level of productivity that would put most other British industries to shame. I was always surprised at the number of Germans I met as an undergraduate student and researcher at Oxford. They came from a primary and secondary educational system that I had admired for years as an exchange student, yet, when I asked them, they all felt that British higher education was far superior. And the German universities (more disorganised, crowded and inefficient than some of our railways) were relatively better than, say the Italian ones. If you don't believe this, read this http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/soe/cihe/newsletter/News15/text14.html review which refers to a survey in "Der Spiegel" (that famous British tabloid) putting British universities ahead of the rest of Europe's as of 1999.
Now we are beginning to suffer the consequences of the more choice/falling standards/lack of people doing intellectually rigorous subjects.
The few who do go and do maths/engineering at university get immediately cherry-picked by industry for well-paid jobs thus leaving education to pick up the crumbs for maths/sciences teaching. The result is declining teaching standards & even fewer students going on to do maths/science at uni.
This has nothing to do with increased choice/falling standards/lack of rigour and everything to do with paying teachers too little. Put up salaries and the problem would fix itself within two years. Similarly, the "shortage" of well-qualified maths/engineering graduates is just like the shortage of I.T. staff in the late nineties---a result of people in senior management being unwilling to pay the going rate for people sneeringly referred to by the technologically illiterate as "techies". This *does* trickle down, however. If big brother can earn as much with a degree in "meedja studies" as he would with a degree in physics then why should little sister bother with all that calculus and those dead hard sums? There are 71% of science engineering and technology (SET) graduates in full-time employment after graduation, compared with 68% of non-SET graduates in full-time employment (courtesy of the DTI: http://www.dti.gov.uk/ost/setstats/data/5/setstats2001-tab0508.htm ). This is hardly a huge difference in employability given that the non-SET students probably do at least 10 hours less timetabled work per week at uni. Students are simply making a rational choice of subject to study.
The fact is that huge amounts are being wasted to meet the bogus targets which do nobody any good except the government because they can then advertise how `successful' they've been & hence get re-elected.
Targets are very useful things, but so are cars---and we all know how dangerous they can be. People who set themselves a list of targets at the start of a day, however, generally achieve more than people who don't. When it comes to government, at least with a target there is something to argue about. I would much rather compare some more-or-less objective performance measure (or argue about its objectivity) than spend time reading an infantile media ruckus about whether or not some old woman was left covered in blood in a hospital waiting room. Public hospital statistics are, like proper public university admissions criteria, shockingly recent innovations which will take time to get right. Methods for calculating UK unemployment figures have varied for decades for political reasons, but now most people use EU criteria which are reasonably reliable and allow for useful comparisons across time and between nations. The same will happen with waiting lists etc. Like many things in a democracy, the obsession with waiting lists arose in response to opposition, public and media demands rather than any real interest on the part of governments.
- Although it's said that IQ has improved, I personally think IQ is another entirely bogus statistic & can't be measured satisfactorily.
At the start of this paragraph I experienced the transient nausea that, for me, always accompanies agreeing with 'Frank Shute'. Luckily he got back on form by paraphrasing the Nazi "interpretation" (too generous a word, I know) of "Darwinism".
Darwinism would seem to say that since the brain-dead can live on social security and procreate, people should be getting thicker
"Darwinism" has never and will never say any such thing. Even if we suppose a population of individuals with inherited mental deficiencies in a persistent vegetative state copulating like rabbits (whoa) there is a phenomenon called recombination which ensures all those scare stories---that there is a supposedly "stupid" subpopulation of humans (usually the too-poor-to-be-educated) reproducing at a faster rate than "the rest of us"---are just that: scare stories. If you want a more extensive tutorial on the scientific shortcomings of the eugenics movement then email me and I'd be happy to oblige with a reading list.
Gross exaggeration. Exams might or might not be easier. Independent
studies suggest they are different but no easier.
Then the studies suck and are done by people who are far from independent.
I merely quote this "argument" because it condemns itself so eloquently---especially as it actually reads like "ya boo sucks!". And it makes me laugh. I need a laugh.
There was a more varied education available then: Unis, Polys, Colleges, apprenticeships...and everybody could find their niche.
And everyone knew their place. We really should keep these oiks away from too rigorous an education, especially if their parents can't afford a decent school to give them the right 'A'-level grades. A good solid practical apprenticeship would do some of these simple, working-class youngsters good. Whoops, I'm at it now.
So should we deny these kids on the grounds they can't pass A
level maths?
No, you should deny them on the basis that university isn't the best place for them to learn such a subject. Education needs to be stratified but not just on the grounds of academic ability.
Perhaps we should stratify education on the grounds of social class or height, or aptitude with a Game Boy? (Actually, I think we should just keep it as it is and stream students according to the income of their parents ;-) . For all the talk of a "classless society" parental income is still the best predictor of final educational outcomes in this country---it's even more reliable than IQ.) If we have a limited number of places at a football academy, we don't admit students on the basis of the stylishness of their haircuts or their ability to pull in a provincial nightclub---or, indeed, how close their parents live to the training grounds. If we select footballers on their relevant skills, what is wrong with stratifying education on the grounds of academic ability? If we must select in our educational system then it is the only fair way to do it. This is one of very few policies compatible with both left- and right-wing ideologies and yet both sides are reluctant to adopt it---I have my own pretty cynical theories as to why. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" is, funnily enough, a quote from Marx.
The exams are easier to pass, there's no question of this - the results prove it.
The first part of this sentence is worthy of examination (excuse me), but the second part is a complete *non sequitur*. It *is* possible for exam results to improve rapidly across an entire nation over a very short time period in exactly the same way that a country's literacy rates can rise markedly. Indeed, the latter is a far harder achievement which has been reproduced more than once in various locations with no relaxing of criteria. Whether academic attainment has improved or not in England and Wales is a question worthy of subtle and disinterested statistical analysis of a kind I fear may be beyond even the so-called 'Frank Shute'.
Hence, there has to be a wider gap between the ability of those who scrape a certain grade & those at the top-end of that grade. A distribution diagram will prove this point.
No it won't. I could begin a disquisition on norm-referencing versus criterion-referencing and the mixture of the two rumoured to be at the heart of English exam boards' grade calculations, but I won't because I'm bored now and it would be like explaining to a skinhead with a broken bottle in his hand why violence is wrong.
the Stalinist govt's bogus targets
Just to round off: our government, for its many faults, is not "Stalinist". Whatever else it is, it could hardly be described as a "nationalizing, totalitarian socialist regime". (And, no, just because lots of other people voted for it, but you didn't, doesn't make it "totalitarian".) I happen to have the day off work today so I have a little time to deal (almost) patiently with one of the more recent displays of wilful ignorance on this list. When the inevitable spluttering, ill-considered reply appears would someone else be interested in carrying the baton of reason? I've got better things to do. -- Damian COUNSELL http://www.counsell.com/