[The idea is to write broadly about the importance of the UK making the best use of everyone's talents and how public policy can help or hinder that objective. This series of articles has not been planned in any detail, so it may meander at times. The first article was about broadly about the apparent lack of interest in the brightest children. Any attention they have got over the last 50 years seems to have been largely as a result of particular individuals or private schools.]
[Great Court, Trinity College, Cambridge in 1697, courtesy of Simon Keynes]
I have already written about how we have blundered in setting up the wrong kind of post-18 educational system, so I will not say much about it in this series. Today around a third of all children aged 18 are going to university. Blair’s aim was apparently to get the proportion above a half. The concept seemed to be that everyone is born equal. Genetics has no say in the distribution of talent. Anyone can be brilliant at anything if they are just taught right, so as many as possible should get the chance to go to university.
Of course, many teenagers lapped up this nonsense. They could see that graduates held most of the top jobs (outside areas like entertainment and sport). So they thought that if they could get a degree, then they would get a top job. QED. In other words, they thought that everyone could end up above average, or even in the top decile or topmost percentile. This has had a plethora of bad outcomes.
The idea that people need training to do a good job is fine. But if you want to be a top receptionist, you need training as a receptionist, not a university degree. Similarly, if you hope to be a top salesman earning over a million a year. The idea of a university is to let students rub shoulders with researchers, who are thinking deeply about their subjects, distilling their essence and pushing forward their boundaries. The large majority of people derive little benefit from this. Even if they did, some form of rationing would be needed, because few people are capable of doing worthwhile research.
So we have created a vast army of almost useless researchers filling the journals with trivia and drivel, a vast army of disaffected young graduates discovering that employers want them to sweep the floors, not chair the board, and taken a significant percentage of those of working age out of productive employment.
A major part of the process of conning the young has been grade inflation, because it has convinced large numbers of children who are not remotely academically bright, that actually they are, because they have just got three As or Bs at A-level. This is an outrageous and cruel deception. I have written about some of the mechanics of this before, and in greater detail here. But looking back, I am not sure I have got across the difficulty of defending against grade inflation.
Suppose that you want 10% of candidates taking an A-level to get a grade A in order to assist universities in allocating scarce places to the best students. How do you arrange the difficulty of the exam to achieve this? Well, you simply set questions of sufficient difficulty to get a reasonable spread of marks. Ideally, you want the best candidates to get close to 100% and the worst close to 0%. Then you simply set the cut-off for grade A so that 10% of candidates fall above it. Suppose that cut-off is 92%.
Next year you set a paper of similar difficulty and adopt similarly stringent marking. You find that 12% of candidates score 92% or more. Does that mean that the candidates are better than the previous year, or that the paper was easier?
Well there is no means of knowing. It is extremely hard to judge the difficulty of an exam paper accurately. This is true even for a subject like maths where there is little room for argument over whether an answer is right or wrong. Once you get onto a subject like history and a question on say the causes of the First World War, the difficulties are obviously far worse. In fact, by far the most reliable means is to give it to a large number of people and see how well they do. In other words, the best guess is that the average ability of the candidates is the same as last year, but the paper was easier. So, even if your objective changes so that now you want to enshrine last year’s standard as an absolute, so that anyone achieving it gets an A grade, the best way to achieve your new objective it is adjust the cut-off so that 10% of candidates fall above it!
In other words, there is no easy way of telling whether the candidates (or any subset of them, such as those awarded an A) are better or worse than the previous year.
That is true even if the system is being run straightforwardly and honestly with no objective except to measure and select accurately.
In practice, such objectives rapidly get diluted with other objectives. These cover a wide spectrum. At one end, there are technical but important issues. What about pre-requisites? Can you be awarded marks for getting them right, or only lose marks for getting them wrong? To take a topical case, suppose your A-level history error shows perfect spelling and grammar but totally fails to answer the question, do you get nil? Fifty years ago, the answer was Yes. Today, the answer is No. Indeed in many exam papers you can scrape a pass with almost nil knowledge of the subject provided you demonstrate excellent command of the pre-requisites and of ancillary techniques (eg you get marks for showing an “essay plan”, irrespective of the essay’s merit). Equally bad, you can fail to get top marks, even if you give a perfect answer to every question if you decline to go along with some of the ancillary requirements (like providing that “essay plan”).
How have we arrived at such an absurd result? Mainly muddled thinking. It is right to deduct marks for failing on pre-requisites, but wrong to give them for succeeding. That perhaps ties in with some of the issues at the other end of the spectrum. We like to put questions in the exam which everyone will be able to get right. Why? What is the point? How does that help to discriminate between people? Well, it is back to Alice in Wonderland and the Caucus-Race: “At last the Dodo said, ‘everybody has won and all must have prizes’.”
More recently we have run into the classic problems of targets and incentives. New Labour arranged things so that teachers’ welfare depended on their school doing well, and exam boards profits depended on teachers choosing their exams over others. So we moved to a situation where everyone involved had a strong incentive to show that the candidates are better than last year. Hence grade inflation. The neat part about it is that provided you do not make the improvement too dramatic, the technical issues alluded to above make it impossible to disprove the improvement over the previous year. Of course, if you compare the papers with those of 50 years ago, the difference is dramatic. But even that is not clear-cut because much depends on the way the marking is done, and the 50 year old marked scripts have conveniently been destroyed. Even so, the difference is so dramatic in maths that it could not be explained by lax marking in the past. But it remains more debatable in a subject like history.
Another major issue is naivety. For no doubt excellent reasons, there has been a big increase in continuous assessment. But that, of course, is wide open to cheating. The situation is clearest if we look at the US, where there is effectively an arms’ race in techniques for plagiarising essays and detecting the plagiarism. But it is not wholly naivety. A substantial body of teachers seem to believe that it is inherently wrong to classify some students as better than others. The focus should be on co-operative work. So we have assessment schemes based on “group work”, which seem to be designed mainly to prevent the able and hard working scoring better than the incompetent and idle.
The whole thing makes my blood boil. We cannot create two hundred or even ten universities of the standard of Oxbridge. We do not have enough world class researchers to staff them. Even if we could, we could not find enough students who would benefit from that style of education. Even if we could, it would be a bad thing to do, because there would not be enough jobs for them to go to where they would benefit from that style of education, and we cannot afford the luxury of providing such an education simply to enrich their lives.
Worse, many of those responsible for pushing this bandwagon along, know that the whole thing is a deceptive and damaging charade, and they still do it, because voters or other constituencies would like it (or some feature of it) to be true.
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