The Education Vector

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 17

The Education Vector¶

October 1995

Editor Ian Clark

This Education Vector has been reprinted from VECTOR Vol.12 No.2. VECTOR is the Quarterly Journal of the British APL Association. For more information about the British APL Association, please contact: Sylvia Camacho, [address and telephone number omitted].

Contents¶

Ian Clark
IAC/Human Interfaces,
[address, telephone number and e-mail address omitted]

Editorial
Raising Standards — or Flying Kites?¶

If you are one of those people who believe that reading newspapers, like tarot cards, confers insight into reality, you cannot fail to have noticed that something’s the matter with our universities this year. They’re being swamped by a tide of mediocrity.

The trouble started with the A-level examination results. Good grades were achieved by too high a proportion of school-leavers, which entitled an excessive number to apply for university admission. Since the human genome doesn’t change that much in the space of a few years, this could only come about, according to some, by a general relaxation of standards.

There is another explanation, which the government has been surprisingly slow to latch onto. It is that the painful re-engineering of public education and welfare over the last few years has at last borne fruit in a cohort of better educated students, additionally motivated by a shot of genuine fear for their future prospects. Students, indeed, who are more able to jump the traditional hurdles designed to filter the candidates for tertiary education.

Perhaps the government doesn’t believe this (a cynical standpoint, in view of their efforts) but suspects the hurdles have been lowered out of self-preservation by unscrupulous academics. But whom exactly do the hurdles filter out, and why?

The traditional concept of matriculation and its successor, the A-level examination, is founded on the premise that only a proportion (from a tenth to a half) of people who put themselves forward for higher education ought to be accepted for it. Otherwise “standards fall”.

There are two views about why standards should fall. The first is that resources are too limited to allow everybody who wants tertiary education to get it, which invites calls for an expansion of places on degree courses. The second is that you don’t want to over-educate the duffers. This invites people to believe that there is some rational criterion being applied to the acceptance and rejection of candidates, a belief which doesn’t bear close examination.

Of course it is open to the more sought-after universities (whatever they imagine they are doing) to select those candidates who can tolerate old-fashioned teaching of patchy quality — in effect teach themselves. This frees the tutors to concentrate on research, consultancy, authorship, cutting a dash in public and other more rewarding activities than the prime purpose of paying them out of the public purse — to train the nation’s youth. Other establishments ape their betters, hoping to avoid the slur that their only role in life is to scavenge the rejects.

But do rational rejection criteria really exist, let alone are they being applied? A longitudinal study of student performance at my old place uncovered no significant correlation (in fact zero) between students’ grades on admission and their eventual class of degree. Granted there are many caveats surrounding this kind of study, it did raise an alarming question. When we selected candidates on the basis of their grades, just what did we imagine we were doing?

Are there no predictors, then, of a candidate’s eventual performance? No, the study didn’t conclude that. Indeed certain syndromes were associated with what might be called (again with a legion of caveats): “losers”. These are the hard-do’ers and the satisficers, who are capable of putting their tutors, counsellors, colleagues — indeed the whole institution — to enormous trouble on their behalf, at small cost to themselves. The sort of person you don’t get to help you carry a ladder, or you end up carrying it yourself, plus him or her dragging along on the other end. Purely on cost-saving grounds, these students amply repay weeding out at the earliest stage.

But that accounts for no more than 5% of the intake. For the rest, it’s not so much a creaming-off process, more a thinning out, like seedling in a tray. Gardeners among us will know the rational basis for this. It is done like decimating a Roman legion, because its purpose is not to select the “best” (most of the seedlings look alike) but to relieve overcrowding.

What is the evidence for overcrowding in today’s educational market? It all depends on the course. Romantic ones like Veterinary Science, or lucrative ones like Law, are heavily oversubscribed. For Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and Engineering, all the signs point to massive overcapacity. In the Tyne-Tees area alone there are now five universities, whereas purely to serve the region’s needs for people educated to degree level you’d be hard-put to make a case for one. Higher education has simply replaced coal and ships as a commodity for export, not to mention occupying the unemployed masses.

Yet we read [Independent, Thursday 31st August, p4] that “7 thousand students are admitted to University each year through foundation courses which do not always require them to have A-levels. Mrs Gillian Shepherd said applicants must be told they had to meet rigorous standards to ... embark on a 3-year degree”.

This is revealing of an attitude to University entrance devoid of rational basis. To the youth of today, Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and Engineering sound like a lot of hard work for pretty small rewards. Is it any wonder that courses are under-subscribed and departments face closure? It’s a matter of public concern (or scandal, depending on how you look at it) that a high proportion of engineering degree students need remedial Mathematics at the how-to-balance-brackets level. But it’s only being realistic to admit such ill-trained candidates, in circumstances that have arisen over the years through public neglect or even deliberate policy. When there’s been a frost in the greenhouse, you don’t thin out the seed-tray. You coddle whatever germinates.

Some Articles in the Current Vector¶

GENERAL ARTICLES¶

The Random Vector¶

TECHNICAL SECTION¶