clicky





Aah so now its a bad thing that more people are getting higher end degrees. Although now with more and more people having degrees, the academic qulaification is being devalued. A job that required A levels 15 years ago now requires a degree, whilst the level of work expected stays the same.

I think the system needs a revamp.

A level qualifications should be made bloody difficult to achieve top grades. I do A levels and I haven't put enough effort in yet I have still acieved.
Overhaul the system and have each grade valued.
As far as degrees are concerned honours should be valued and therefore exclusive.

If you have system that wants 50%+ to go to University by definition the standards will have to be lowered. Otherwise you will never get the "right" amount being able to go.
When I did my A levels, back in the mist of time, it was a one shot system. Screw up on the day and that was effectivly 2 years down the toilet. I would love to see some current students survive on that sort of stress (without rushing out to get a doctors note of course).

You could have 50% go to Uni if standards were higher, currently there are too many A grade students for the top unis to deal with. If standards were higher it would mean the bottom Unis lower thier standards.

I think it depends on whether more people are taking the courses and putting in the work and getting top degrees, or whether the courses are also being dumbed down, as well as filled out with students.

If the latter is the case, then there is something to the accusation, if it is just more people are doing the courses and they are generally smart enough to get the degree under the existing standards, then that is something else - maybe they should increase the difficulty as we, as a population are getting smarter...

Wait a second, I just looked at daytime TV, I don't think we are getting smarter.

aye yes the vast deep ocean which is filled with very similar species of chat shows, antigque shows,cookery shows and property programmes.

http://tech.uk.msn.com/features/gallery ... ageindex=4
Though media in general annoys me such as the above feature which seems to assume everyone attends lovely middle class cosmopolitan dinner parties like they do and further goes to assume that no one cares that someone had thier relation ship split up, no one cares or just you don't care if so ignore it. Articles like that one seem to apeal the the ever broadening mass of middle class city workers who are so impossibly selfish that they assume attention to the matters of others is utterly below them.

I work in a fairly popular University, so we ask for high grades simply due to supply & demand. Not a lot of people know that not only do you get your government funding cut if you have too few students, you get your funding cut if you have too many too (yes, think about the logic of that for a minute...). It's known in the 'industry' as the Goldilocks funding model.

So the result is the grades we ask for are not some objective measure of 'to do this degree you need to be this smart' they are as much to do with 'we need 30 students on this course this year, so if we set the required grades to this that means we'll get roughly that many'.
The thing you would therefore expect this would mean that over time the grades we ask for would fall as we are told to recruit more students. The problem is the supply of students is not uniform across disciplines. This means that the grades on 'unfashionable' (i.e. tricky) degrees - sciences for example - are going down but the requirements for degrees which are fashionable - media, business studies, english, social sciences - are going up.

I see students every day - they're no smarter than I was when I was a student. But they do have higher grades.

I think the problem is essentially down to the system being target driven rather than allowing it to meet it's own equilibrium. The FE colleges have a target to educate a certain number of students to a certain level. That means, intentionally or subconsciously, a pressure to give students those grades. The universities then have a pressure to accept them to meet their targets and then to make sure they earn a degree to meet another target. Instead of the old way we did it, which was to find out how smart someone is by letting them rise through the education system until they reach their level.

Jon