5 ms·

I don't understand why they even need to gives these kids a single grade. The biggest consumer of grading are schools, colleges and university anyway. Just ma

by 7952 6y ago

I don't understand why they even need to gives these kids a single grade. The biggest consumer of grading are schools, colleges and university anyway. Just make more of the underlying data available to them and let the decide for themselves. And as an employer I think it would be useful to have a more complete picture of the student than just a single grade. All this fiasco does is demonstrate how unnecessarily reductive the whole concept is.

simonh 6y ago
The Universities know this and are working with students that missed the required grades to understand what their projected grades, mock results etc were and make a case by case evaluation. It's nowhere near as dire a situation as is being made out. I watched the news broadcasts when the results were announced. There were TV journalists at schools in deprived areas interviewing students before the grades were released, with the journalists giving dour warnings about the impending problems they expected. When the results were announced the students were leaping about with joy, hugging and celebrating, it was like a world cup win. The journalists didn't seem to know what to say. back in the studio the best the presenter could do was mutter that "I'm sure we'll find some students that were disappointed later". I'm sure they did.
- Traster 6y ago
  Yes, because the kids whose futures just got screwed aren't the ones liable to be jumping around in front of everyone.
arethuza 6y ago
University entrance requirements in the UK are pretty much always expressed in terms of sets of grades for A levels (rUK) or Highers (Scotland) - often with additional requirements (e.g. must include maths). The entire entrance process pretty much uses grades as the first filter - changing that would be a huge amount of work not to mention a lot of people will have conditional offers that are expressed in terms of these grades. So picking a course at random (Physics at Edinburgh) requires: SQA Highers: AAAA - AAAB or A Levels: AAA - ABB https://www.ed.ac.uk/studying/undergraduate/degrees/index.php?action=view&code=F300 https://www.ed.ac.uk/studying/undergraduate/degrees/index.ph...
- gorgoiler 6y ago
  To re-implement the University application process would indeed be a huge amount of work. However, the governing principal of Cambridge University, for example, is that all operations are done at a human scale, and I think when you factor in the large numbers of staff whose labour the Universities have access to, it becomes possible. For a group of applicants for Computer Science at a Cambridge college, for example, you would have a Director of Studies and one or two other staff ranking around 20 applicants for half as many places. (The ratio of applicants to places is much higher prior to interview.) It is a tractable problem to solve, even if for other institutions the process is scaled by 2x/3x (4:1 / 6:1, up to Nottingham’s reputed 13:1) or maybe even more. An idea we mooted over dinner last night was for these applicant rankings to be fed to UCAS — the University and Colleges Admissions Service — and for UCAS to combine these rankings with the applicant preferences to fill up each course from the top down. No need for grades, just use the desirability metric provided by the institutions. Grades themselves are a strange beast. By their nature they are different to raw marks. A grade speaks to your ability as part of the entire cohort of examined pupils in that subject. Without the exam, taken nationally under examination conditions, it just doesn’t seem to make sense to refer to grades. If we called them “exam grades” perhaps the folly of trying to assign them to pupils, who have not actually taken an exam, would be clearer. (I speak with no real authority, but I am a high school teacher in England.)
  - arethuza 6y ago
    Doesn't Oxbridge interview a lot of people very year anyway - so they are already geared up to a process that appears to be pretty different, and more labour intensive, than other institutions?
    - NLips 6y ago
      Yes. Holding interviews at each of Oxford and Cambridge are approximately 2 weeks of full time work for tutors, with paid full-time assistance from some students, and with admin from other college and university staff.
  - rcxdude 6y ago
timthorn 6y ago
What underlying data do you want to make available? There's no consistent data collection across the schools, what there is exists for internal use at a school so there's no requirement for it to be to any particular standard or of any particular frequency throughout the course. It's also a single grade per subject, so the university /employer will usually have 3-5 grades to work with, as well as the broader picture built up from the personal statement/cover letter and interview.
lordnacho 6y ago
The underlying data is just more grades though, isn't it? How you did on this or that exam, coursework, etc? Minus substantial facts like whether you were ill, your gran died, whether you had tutoring, and so on? You're right that grades are reductive, but the alterntive isn't more of the same information.
kiplkipl 6y ago
That passes the buck on to the university addmissions teams. Then it's the same story with Oxbridge as the antagonists. Fundamentally it's a hard problem: the admissions require more information than is available. But... > All this fiasco does is demonstrate how unnecessarily reductive the whole concept is. ...there never really was enough information. This is an important factor IMO. The system has always been unfair, now it's less fair and in a colder, more obvious , more systematic way that resonates with the current political climate around technology. Politically it's hard for this government to get away with standing by a policy that adversely affects poor students in the same way it would have been hard for a left-wing government to institute the current fiscal policy. >kids Nit: almost all of them are now legally adults. At university they can look forward to this twilight age where they are treated as an adult when it's about financial obligations and treated as a child when it's their institutions forcing policy upon them.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  The Tory line has always been "Work hard and get ahead." It's an outright lie, because the reality has always been "Go to the right school and have the right parents and get ahead." But much middle class [1] and some working class Tory support still believes in the social status dream, and this fiasco has directly undermined that narrative. The party is getting huge heat from its base over this, not just because of their future prospects, but because some of them are now wondering if "Work hard and get ahead" has ever been true for them. [1] Note for the US - in the UK "middle class" specifically means "Highly educated professionals with significant cultural and political capital" not just "People with a degree making decent money."
  - jfk13 6y ago
    > The Tory line has always been "Work hard and get ahead." It's an outright lie, because the reality has always been "Go to the right school and have the right parents and get ahead." But it's not as simple as that, either. Coincidentally, I just read an obituary of John Hume, who was born into poverty in Derry and rose -- through education and hard work -- to become a leading politician and a Nobel prize winner. https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/john-hume-obituary-nationalist-leader-who-championed-agreed-ireland-1.4320556 https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/john-hume-o...
michaelt 6y ago
> And as an employer I think it would be useful to have a more complete picture of the student than just a single grade. The current system isn't coping well with COVID-19 but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater here. The current system is simple, and that means it can be seen to be fair. If studying X at university Y needs grades AAB that's easy to understand and you know it's not biased. I much prefer that to the American system where every university has an opaque system that purports to look at a complete picture of the student then mysteriously picks white students over Asian students with better grades and can't explain why.
- maxehmookau 6y ago
  > The current system is simple, and that means it can be seen to be fair. If studying X at university Y needs grades AAB that's easy to understand and you know it's not biased. If only it were that simple. Universities often also take in to account the outcome of in-person interviews which are inherantly biased.
  - ixfo 6y ago
    And clearing - i.e. what happens to match people to the vacant spaces left by those who didn't make the offer target - is almost 100% interview based, usually by phone and on results day.
  - StevenWaterman 6y ago
    Very few universities still do in-person interviews because of that bias. Only Oxford and Cambridge require them. UCL and Imperial offer them optionally. Some courses like Medicine do have interviews at institutions that usually don't interview.
    - toyg 6y ago
      “Only” the two most famous (and arguably best, in a number of fields) institutions. They set the tone.
      - 6y ago
robotresearcher 6y ago
It's not a single grade. It's a set of usually 3 or 4 grades in subjects the students selected at (US) grade 10 . The choice of subjects contains a lot of information about the students' objectives and the grades show the performance level. The national normalized exam structure is intended to compensate somewhat for large regional and social inequalities. It does not achieve this perfectly, of course.
onei 6y ago
That's more or less what one of the Oxford colleges did. They realised all grades were guesses and that the information they had when offers were made had not changed quantifiably. So they let all existing offers stand regardless of what grades students were assigned. I think it's a shame this was the exception rather than the norm.

by 7952 6y ago

simonh 6y ago

The Universities know this and are working with students that missed the required grades to understand what their projected grades, mock results etc were and make a case by case evaluation. It's nowhere near as dire a situation as is being made out. I watched the news broadcasts when the results were announced. There were TV journalists at schools in deprived areas interviewing students before the grades were released, with the journalists giving dour warnings about the impending problems they expected. When the results were announced the students were leaping about with joy, hugging and celebrating, it was like a world cup win. The journalists didn't seem to know what to say. back in the studio the best the presenter could do was mutter that "I'm sure we'll find some students that were disappointed later". I'm sure they did.

Traster 6y ago
Yes, because the kids whose futures just got screwed aren't the ones liable to be jumping around in front of everyone.

arethuza 6y ago

University entrance requirements in the UK are pretty much always expressed in terms of sets of grades for A levels (rUK) or Highers (Scotland) - often with additional requirements (e.g. must include maths). The entire entrance process pretty much uses grades as the first filter - changing that would be a huge amount of work not to mention a lot of people will have conditional offers that are expressed in terms of these grades. So picking a course at random (Physics at Edinburgh) requires: SQA Highers: AAAA - AAAB or A Levels: AAA - ABB https://www.ed.ac.uk/studying/undergraduate/degrees/index.php?action=view&code=F300 https://www.ed.ac.uk/studying/undergraduate/degrees/index.ph...

gorgoiler 6y ago
To re-implement the University application process would indeed be a huge amount of work. However, the governing principal of Cambridge University, for example, is that all operations are done at a human scale, and I think when you factor in the large numbers of staff whose labour the Universities have access to, it becomes possible. For a group of applicants for Computer Science at a Cambridge college, for example, you would have a Director of Studies and one or two other staff ranking around 20 applicants for half as many places. (The ratio of applicants to places is much higher prior to interview.) It is a tractable problem to solve, even if for other institutions the process is scaled by 2x/3x (4:1 / 6:1, up to Nottingham’s reputed 13:1) or maybe even more. An idea we mooted over dinner last night was for these applicant rankings to be fed to UCAS — the University and Colleges Admissions Service — and for UCAS to combine these rankings with the applicant preferences to fill up each course from the top down. No need for grades, just use the desirability metric provided by the institutions. Grades themselves are a strange beast. By their nature they are different to raw marks. A grade speaks to your ability as part of the entire cohort of examined pupils in that subject. Without the exam, taken nationally under examination conditions, it just doesn’t seem to make sense to refer to grades. If we called them “exam grades” perhaps the folly of trying to assign them to pupils, who have not actually taken an exam, would be clearer. (I speak with no real authority, but I am a high school teacher in England.)
- arethuza 6y ago
  Doesn't Oxbridge interview a lot of people very year anyway - so they are already geared up to a process that appears to be pretty different, and more labour intensive, than other institutions?
  - NLips 6y ago
    Yes. Holding interviews at each of Oxford and Cambridge are approximately 2 weeks of full time work for tutors, with paid full-time assistance from some students, and with admin from other college and university staff.
- rcxdude 6y ago

timthorn 6y ago

What underlying data do you want to make available? There's no consistent data collection across the schools, what there is exists for internal use at a school so there's no requirement for it to be to any particular standard or of any particular frequency throughout the course. It's also a single grade per subject, so the university /employer will usually have 3-5 grades to work with, as well as the broader picture built up from the personal statement/cover letter and interview.

lordnacho 6y ago

The underlying data is just more grades though, isn't it? How you did on this or that exam, coursework, etc? Minus substantial facts like whether you were ill, your gran died, whether you had tutoring, and so on? You're right that grades are reductive, but the alterntive isn't more of the same information.

kiplkipl 6y ago

That passes the buck on to the university addmissions teams. Then it's the same story with Oxbridge as the antagonists. Fundamentally it's a hard problem: the admissions require more information than is available. But... > All this fiasco does is demonstrate how unnecessarily reductive the whole concept is. ...there never really was enough information. This is an important factor IMO. The system has always been unfair, now it's less fair and in a colder, more obvious , more systematic way that resonates with the current political climate around technology. Politically it's hard for this government to get away with standing by a policy that adversely affects poor students in the same way it would have been hard for a left-wing government to institute the current fiscal policy. >kids Nit: almost all of them are now legally adults. At university they can look forward to this twilight age where they are treated as an adult when it's about financial obligations and treated as a child when it's their institutions forcing policy upon them.

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
The Tory line has always been "Work hard and get ahead." It's an outright lie, because the reality has always been "Go to the right school and have the right parents and get ahead." But much middle class [1] and some working class Tory support still believes in the social status dream, and this fiasco has directly undermined that narrative. The party is getting huge heat from its base over this, not just because of their future prospects, but because some of them are now wondering if "Work hard and get ahead" has ever been true for them. [1] Note for the US - in the UK "middle class" specifically means "Highly educated professionals with significant cultural and political capital" not just "People with a degree making decent money."
- jfk13 6y ago
  > The Tory line has always been "Work hard and get ahead." It's an outright lie, because the reality has always been "Go to the right school and have the right parents and get ahead." But it's not as simple as that, either. Coincidentally, I just read an obituary of John Hume, who was born into poverty in Derry and rose -- through education and hard work -- to become a leading politician and a Nobel prize winner. https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/john-hume-obituary-nationalist-leader-who-championed-agreed-ireland-1.4320556 https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/john-hume-o...

michaelt 6y ago

> And as an employer I think it would be useful to have a more complete picture of the student than just a single grade. The current system isn't coping well with COVID-19 but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater here. The current system is simple, and that means it can be seen to be fair. If studying X at university Y needs grades AAB that's easy to understand and you know it's not biased. I much prefer that to the American system where every university has an opaque system that purports to look at a complete picture of the student then mysteriously picks white students over Asian students with better grades and can't explain why.

maxehmookau 6y ago
> The current system is simple, and that means it can be seen to be fair. If studying X at university Y needs grades AAB that's easy to understand and you know it's not biased. If only it were that simple. Universities often also take in to account the outcome of in-person interviews which are inherantly biased.
- ixfo 6y ago
  And clearing - i.e. what happens to match people to the vacant spaces left by those who didn't make the offer target - is almost 100% interview based, usually by phone and on results day.
- StevenWaterman 6y ago
  Very few universities still do in-person interviews because of that bias. Only Oxford and Cambridge require them. UCL and Imperial offer them optionally. Some courses like Medicine do have interviews at institutions that usually don't interview.
  - toyg 6y ago
    “Only” the two most famous (and arguably best, in a number of fields) institutions. They set the tone.
    - 6y ago

robotresearcher 6y ago

It's not a single grade. It's a set of usually 3 or 4 grades in subjects the students selected at (US) grade 10 . The choice of subjects contains a lot of information about the students' objectives and the grades show the performance level. The national normalized exam structure is intended to compensate somewhat for large regional and social inequalities. It does not achieve this perfectly, of course.

onei 6y ago

That's more or less what one of the Oxford colleges did. They realised all grades were guesses and that the information they had when offers were made had not changed quantifiably. So they let all existing offers stand regardless of what grades students were assigned. I think it's a shame this was the exception rather than the norm.