The A-Level pass rate has risen for the 28th successive year.
Debasing the coinage. It’s what governments do.
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Education, Education, Education, Education, Education, Education, Education, Education, Education, Education, Education, Education, Education, Education, Education, Education, Education, Education, Education, Education, Education, Education, EducationAugust 19th, 2010 |
 15 comments to Education, Education, Education, Education, Education, Education, Education, Education, Education, Education, Education, Education, Education, Education, Education, Education, Education, Education, Education, Education, Education, Education, Education |
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I wrote a fairly long samizdata comment on thus subject last August that seems relevant.
I want to make a distinction for a moment between the value of education and the value of grades. The value of the former is absolute. The personal value of being exposed to information and ideas can’t be diminished by other people being exposed to them. Quite the opposite in fact; conversations between ‘educated people’ in the informal sense of the word are synergistic. When a group of people is talking from a higher shared base of knowledge and understanding there is a net gain for everyone in the group. Compare the quality of debate on Samizdata with that in your local pub if you doubt this. However as many people have pointed out, education has nothing to do with grades. The only purpose of a grading system is to enable third parties such as Universities and employers to make comparisons between student A and student B. A grade has no value in and of itself but only relative to and in comparison with other grades
The media obsesses about grade inflation every year but as usual it asks entirely the wrong questions. Are the A Levels easier than they were ten or fifteen years ago?
While the answer is obviously yes its also a pretty pointless question.
Generally speaking graduates at whatever level compete for jobs and university places with others of the same age cohort as themselves.
The real purpose of grade inflation in my view is that it serves as a political tool to obscure the vast differences in quality between a state education and a private one.
The grading system now in place serves to obscure information rather than reveal it.
If they set the grade ceiling is low enough that anyone reasonably bright and industrious can hit the highest grades they can mask the gulf.
It also means that they can determine who fills the places in the higher education system in accordance with their social engineering project and their egalitarian ideology rather than by academic merit. After all if every applicant to Oxbridge has maxed out grades they can use any criteria they want to distinguish between them .
Schools are useless, all they are is hives for bullying. They discourage and sneer at creativity and original thinking (the way to succeed is to conform and obey, hardly a good lesson for children and students to learn).
I think many of us would be better off without the wretched nonsense of education. I have learnt more through my own endeavours than via the mind-narrowing,
Abolish schools and the misery they inflict on the young, for many of whom their school years are the worst years of their lives.
The whole notion of “education” should be done away with, its the responsibility of parents to teach their children.
Abolish all schools, free people from their stinking slavery.
nothing personal against the UK, but it makes me feel a little less alone to know that the US isn’t the only stupid country in the anglo-sphere doing this kind of idiotic thing.
Yet again we fall victim to the collectivist ideology that what’s good for one must be good for all. Not everyone needs three A-levels and a University degree. It’s positively damaging to assume that they do.
Jay’s comment is profound because the race to grades only happens because many people make decisions based on the grades. The relative significance of grades is one thing that many an employer fails to note.
I don’t see anything “pointless” about pointing out that the currency of examinations has been weakened. If this makes some people uncomfortable, tough.
I disagree Jay. You seem to be assuming that if two people have the same grade, universities and employers have no way to distinguish between them. I don’t think that has ever been the case and isn’t now.
Oxford never used to rely on A levels anyway; it set its own entrance exams and interviews and set risible A-level targets (generally two Es) for candidates it liked. Similarly, any employer taking on a candidate just by counting up their A level grades would be mad.
There were, however, plenty of universities which were quite willing to offer places on just two criteria: where you put them in your list of preferences, and your grades. This is lazy and stupid, and when I’m interviewing people these days I have something of a bias against graduates from universities which simply took people who put them first choice (e.g. Nottingham).
We’ve moved from a system where we had a hotpotch of different curricula and standards which everyone pretended were objective, to a system which obliges selection on something a bit more in-depth than just counting up “ucca points”. This strikes me as an entirely good thing.
And if there really is this “quality gulf” between private and state education, the better candidates should win from two with the same grade, unless the difference between them really is just the grade.
@Richard Thomas: “Three” A Levels? You’re a bit behind the times, I am sorry to say.
They all take at least five now, and almost everyone gets 5 A’s, as far as I can tell.
Back in my day – and yours, I assume – only the most colossal eggheads were even allowed to take four: the view was that it would be beyond anyone else, and the view was correct.
That was then, this is now.
Andrew, you are right, I am very much behind the times.
I was actually one of those allowed to take four but dropped one (biology) as it was my least favourite and added disproportionately to the workload. I was very much cautioned against doing it in the first place.
I’m not fan of public education, however, the simple fact that people are getting better grades doesn’t demand the conclusion that the standards are falling. It is perfectly possible that candidates are actually getting better. This could be because of superior learning, or other pressures, such as more focused curriculum, or tighter advancement criteria. I know, for example, of one girl who was placed under a lot of pressure not to take A level English, because they were concerned that she wouldn’t do well.
The article Natalie cites does make some handwavy reference to a “study”, but it just reeks to me of your usual “education scientist” complaining about the “government.”
I don’t know if kids are getting smarter, and I think there is plenty wrong with public education, but it seems to me that Natalie has not demonstrated the case of “grade inflation” at all.
Might I suggest, for all you libertarians out there, that perhaps the introduction of competition into schools by way of league tables might actually incentive this result?
Jessica Boxer,
I certainly admit that my rather brief post did not prove that grade inflation had occurred – though twenty eight years of alleged improvement certainly suggests that it has.
Be that as it may, I can assure you that grade inflation has occurred in the subject I know best: Physics.
One of the ways I have made a humble living is in the merry world of educational publishing. For work reasons I have gone through the Physics specifications (what they used to call the syllabus) from several exam boards line by line and have compared them in detail to the O-Level and A-Level syllabus of thirty or so years ago.
Much easier now. Most of the difference is in the level of mathematics expected.
One would think that with online testing easily available for employers the signaling value of good grades and the name of a university with a good reputation on your graduation certificate would have declined. If a bright young thing took a company’s online recruitment tests and came out top they should warrant an interview even if they got poor grades from an unknown univeristy? Any evidence of this happening? I haven’t seen anything to suggest that it is, with university fee inflation rampant in the states (where there is a market). Anybody else?
Jessica must be a teacher. That may be an unfair extrapolation but one consistent with my experience when encountering people who defend education systems.
The succint explanation for what league tables produce has been made by the often acerbic John Brignell at http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/
I do believe employers are very aware of the grade inflation, particularly at universities and criteria for hiring these days is becoming based more and more on measures external to the education system.
There has been quite a bit of analysis going on about the value of a University degree (particularly in America where the cost is prohibitive) particularly when discounted with interest for the cost and time wasted compared with what could be earned and learned from real life and working at real jobs.
I often think the reason that Britian produced so many brilliant engineers is that a great many of them started their careers as apprentices working with real machinery and real problems without chasing an “acedemic education” first.
J. S. Mill was wary of government running all schools directly – he made various pro freedom noises about diversity and so on (he would have loved the contradictory state financed “free schools” idea of Mr Gove and co).
However, he supported government setting examinations that all children (including children at schools which were not financed by the state) would have to sit. In this Mill showed (yet again) the muddled thinking that is such a feature of the modern liberal mind.
Examinations are something that government must have nothing to do with – for, as Natalie Solent points out, they will seek to debase them in order to pretend the success of their policies.
” But will not private examination people do that also?” – Yes if the government (or government financed people) is their primary customer.
No – if the primary customers are private employers (and others) who really want to know how well the children did.
One of the key indicators that Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was in fact a Ponzi scheme was the lack of volatility in the returns.
If standards were genuinely improving, there would be improvement in the average score, but there would also be volatility. Scores would improve by 6% one year, then they would decline by 3% one year, then get better by 4% the next, and so on.
In any genuine distribution of results, an improvement 28 years in a row is so improbable as to be for all practical purposes impossible. 28 consecutive years of improvement simply indicates both that the results are rigged and that the people who did the rigging are innumerate.