September 14, 2003

Dumb and Dumber

The Government has decided that 50% of the population aged 18-30 must go through higher education within the next seven years. It has lowered the standards of exams for GCSE and A-level to ensure this. After all, students aren't going to get smarter, so the only thing left to do is recruit thicker ones.

The senior examiner of the GCSE maths exam for the past nine years for Edexcel, one of the main exam providers, has admitted the results were fixed this year. Because candidates for the exam had the worst marks in a decade, the grading scale was radically adjusted to make sure the required number got good enough grades to go on to A-level. Normally it takes 50% on the exam to get a C. This year it was 42%. As David Kent told The Sunday Times, “If we had set the grade C boundary at 50%, the proportion passing would have been considerably less. In fact, it would have been so low we didn’t even consider it."

According to Mr Kent, the exam boards make sure that the same proportion of students pass the exam each year, regardless of how well they actually do.

The cover up the scandal, Edexcel have refused to release the actual "raw" marks to the students. In other words, those who tok the exam are now allowed to know how many questions they actually missed. David Burghes, a former chairman of examiners and professor of education at Exeter University said, “We know it is a fiddle because students have not been given their raw marks on the papers.”

One thing that the Government hasn't been able to do is keep the new students once they ship them off to university. Even with remedial classes and a general dumbing-down of the university curriculum (since it is useless to teach completely over their heads), 40% of students are dropping out of some universities.

Universities have alway had some students drop out for various reasons. Even Cambridge and Oxford, lose 1.3% and 2% of students respectively before they complete their degrees. But this is nothing like London Metropolitan where 38% drop out. While increased tuition fees and the Government's increasing willingness to burden students with educational debt plays some role in all of this, The Sunday Times reports that research from the Institute for Higher Education Policy found that the lower a student’s grades before going to university, the higher the chance of dropping out.

So as a result, the Government is intent on creating a nation of university drop-outs saddled with debt.

Posted by david at September 14, 2003 02:32 PM | TrackBack
Comments

Dear Readers:

In April, your newspaer published a news story on me in regard to me appearing in Her Most Excellent Majesty's Crown Court, at Merthyr Tydfil, in South Wales, in regard to producing to Her Majesty's Bench, a letter from His Holiness, Pope John Paul 11. I would like to say that you may wish to look back at that site, and read the comment I have just attached to it. The fact is that your journalist said that I had bought the "fake" reference off the internet. The CPS , together with British Police, could not find out where the Vatican document came from, which was in full Italian, bearing the Seal and Insignia of the Vatican.

May I suggest in future, your journalist appears in Her Majesty's most honourable Crown Courts to ascertain the facts of a case prior to publishing news of it on a web site.

Kind regards.

Julian Evans. BA.Th.

Posted by: Julian Evans at September 27, 2003 11:58 PM

This isn't a newspaper and I'm not a journalist. I'm just a blogger who mentioned what I read on the website of a national broadsheet newspaper.

But since you've mentioned it, you didn't mention where, in fact, you got the reference. Of course neither the CPS nor the magistrates are going to accept into evidence a document for which the provenance cannot be ascertained, especially if the party proffering the document will not give evidence to support it.

Posted by: David Holford at September 29, 2003 10:39 PM