'whites' should be marked down by racist teachers says fascist 'new' labour

[abelard]

https://www.tes.com/news/boost-bame-gcse-grades-10-counter-bias
"Pupils from black and minority ethnic backgrounds should have their
teacher-assessed grades inflated by between 1 and 10 per cent, a new
study suggests.

The report by the Equality Act Review campaign group, endorsed by a
senior Labour MP, suggests that factors such as a pupil's learning
style should be used to work out how much their GCSE or A-level grades
should be increased to make up any bias in the system against them."

[Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells]

On Thu, 03 Dec 2020 14:29:06 +0100, abelard <abelard3.@abelard.org>
wrote:

Sounds like a good way to devalue academic qualifications even
further.

Why not just eliminate 'fail' in university degrees?

[abelard]

the big dividend from covid is that intelligent
children are no longer having so much of their time wasted
in blob schools

[Andy Walker]

On 03/12/2020 13:48, Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells wrote:
> Why not just eliminate 'fail' in university degrees?

Effectively done a long time ago. If you don't pass your third-
year exams, even after re-sit, you qualify for a diploma based on the
results of your first two years. If you don't pass your second-year
exams, even after re-sit, you qualify for a certificate based on the
results of your first year. If you don't pass your first-year exams,
even after re-sit, then a decent university will find you a place at a
less decent university, unless you choose to withdraw voluntarily.
Some of the diploma/certificate students will equally find places on
less decent courses, and may then eventually get their degrees. Only
the very worst places actually fail anyone.

No-one who matters is deceived by any of this. Employers long
ago [1990-ish?] gave up on taking qualifications, CVs and references
seriously. They interview you and give you tests. These are no better
than degrees, CVs and references, but at least they are private grief;
if it all goes pear-shaped, there is no comeback to the university.

--
Andy Walker, Nottingham.
Andy's music pages: www.cuboid.me.uk/andy/Music
Composer of the day: www.cuboid.me.uk/andy/Music/Composers/Necke

[Joe]

On Thu, 3 Dec 2020 14:47:15 +0000
Andy Walker <a...@cuboid.co.uk> wrote:

>
> No-one who matters is deceived by any of this. Employers long
> ago [1990-ish?] gave up on taking qualifications, CVs and references
> seriously. They interview you and give you tests. These are no
> better than degrees, CVs and references, but at least they are
> private grief; if it all goes pear-shaped, there is no comeback to
> the university.
>

The problem there is that in a lot of businesses, management cannot do
the jobs of those being managed, and hence don't know what to look for
in interviews. It's even worse if there's an HR department.

In my freelance career, I was twice engaged to interview a prospective
employee from a technical point of view, because there was nobody in
the company able to do so.

In my years of employment before going freelance, I had good managers
and bad ones. Correlation is not causation, but the good managers could
themselves all do the job I was doing, the bad managers could not, and
effectively didn't know whether I was doing it correctly.

--
Joe

[JNugent]

On 03/12/2020 14:47, Andy Walker wrote:

> On 03/12/2020 13:48, Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells wrote:

>> Why not just eliminate 'fail' in university degrees?
>
>     Effectively done a long time ago.  If you don't pass your third-
> year exams, even after re-sit, you qualify for a diploma based on the
> results of your first two years.  If you don't pass your second-year
> exams, even after re-sit, you qualify for a certificate based on the
> results of your first year.  If you don't pass your first-year exams,
> even after re-sit, then a decent university will find you a place at a
> less decent university, unless you choose to withdraw voluntarily.
> Some of the diploma/certificate students will equally find places on
> less decent courses, and may then eventually get their degrees.  Only
> the very worst places actually fail anyone.

OK, it's nearly forty years ago, but two people (both, as it happens,
female) were failed on my course (at the finals stage). One of them I'd
thought would be a third, but I fully expected the other to get a fail.

[Bender B. Rodriguez]

And how many people in positions of authority are going to dare argue
against it? In fact, how many would even want to, now that the long
march through the institutions is complete?

[Andy Walker]

On 03/12/2020 15:49, Joe wrote:
[I wrote:]

>> No-one who matters is deceived by any of this. Employers long
>> ago [1990-ish?] gave up on taking qualifications, CVs and references
>> seriously. They interview you and give you tests. These are no
>> better than degrees, CVs and references, but at least they are
>> private grief; if it all goes pear-shaped, there is no comeback to
>> the university.
> The problem there is that in a lot of businesses, management cannot do
> the jobs of those being managed, and hence don't know what to look for
> in interviews. It's even worse if there's an HR department.
> In my freelance career, I was twice engaged to interview a prospective
> employee from a technical point of view, because there was nobody in
> the company able to do so.

All very true, but again irrelevant from my perspective as a
university lecturer trying to do my best as both teacher and referee
for the students. We spent a lot of time and effort assessing them,
and then discovered that the effort was wasted, at least for those
students who went into "industry" [broadly defined]. For myself, I
realised all this when requests for references completely dried up.
When I retired, I extracted all the references I had written, esp but
not only for personal tutees. Up to about 1990, I averaged three+
references per tutee. Afterwards, it was about one per year, mostly
for prospective research students.

FWIW, we talked to a lot of employers, partly but not only
because we were expected to pay attention to their needs in relation
to course content. Basically, the response with always "Just carry
on, you're doing a good job, we're perfectly happy with your output,
and in any case we'll do our own assessment and fill in any gaps as
part of our training." I don't know how true that was, but it
enabled us to tick a few boxes.

[Joe]

Maybe the point I was making didn't come across clearly enough: the
bits of paper, the grossly exaggerated (sorry, polished) CVs, the
references, they are all that many employers have to go on, not having
management staff knowledgable enough to get the information they need
from tests and interviews, indeed not really knowing what
qualifications their potential employees need in order to do a
particular job. Little wonder that the only possible employment policy
is to ignore the newly-qualified and just head-hunt someone already
doing the same job for someone else.

An MBA doesn't confer technical knowledge and a senior manager in one
line of business cannot just be dropped into a different kind of
business, given a bit of product training and be expected to do as good
a job as he did before. He *relies* on bits of paper to tell him who to
employ, even if he doesn't trust them. The bits of paper *need* to be
meaningful. Otherwise all we have is wall-to-wall Peter Principle.

--
Joe

[Andy Walker]

On 03/12/2020 17:59, JNugent wrote:
[I wrote:]

>> On 03/12/2020 13:48, Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells wrote:
>>> Why not just eliminate 'fail' in university degrees?

>>      Effectively done a long time ago. [...]

> OK, it's nearly forty years ago, but two people (both, as it happens,
> female) were failed on my course (at the finals stage). One of them
> I'd thought would be a third, but I fully expected the other to get a
> fail.

Yes, that's just a few years before the system changed. It
came about because of a desire to allow "credit accumulation and
transfer". Previously, your first two years didn't necessarily
count for anything if your department was hard-hearted. Afterwards,
you could, if you chose, take forward your first two years to a
different university [in a different country, potentially] that
would take you, some of which will award sub-degree qualifications
based on two years work. Given that, under CAT, all qualifications
are supposed [ha!] to be measured on a uniform scale, it's churlish
not to recognise that work in your own university.

[abelard]

On Thu, 3 Dec 2020 18:42:27 +0000, "Bender B. Rodriguez" <n...@way.com>
wrote:

in essence, schools train efficient betas at best

they primarily train children not to think

[James Hammerton]

They're opting for an easy hack (frig with the grades) rather than the
task of actually identifying the causes of such bias and figuring out
ways of removing it.

Regards,

James

[Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells]

There actually is no bias. Those BAME (mostly B) students bitching
about one simply aren't up to it acdemically. Peer pressure will
quickly ensure that any academic aptitude/ambition is suppressed.

[Incubus]

You and they are making the mistake of assuming that there is bias in the first
instance. Identify the problem first and see what remedy can be made.