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Value Added?

Posted in Bad Statistics, Education with tags , , , , , on October 22, 2012 by telescoper

Busy busy busy. Only a few minutes for a lunchtime post today. I’ve a feeling I’m going to be writing that rather a lot over the next few weeks. Anyway, I thought I’d use the opportunity to enlist the help of the blogosphere to try to solve a problem for me.

Yesterday I drew attention to the Guardian University league tables for Physics (purely for the purposes of pointing out that excellent departments exist outside the Russell Group). One thing I’ve never understood about these legal tables is the column marked “value added”. Here is the (brief) explanation offered:

The value-added score compares students’ individual degree results with their entry qualifications, to show how effective the teaching is. It is given as a rating out of 10.

If you look at the scores you will find the top department, Oxford, has a score of 6 for “value added”;  in deference to my alma matter, I’ll note that Cambridge doesn’t appear in these tables.  Sussex scores 9 on value-added, while  Cardiff only scores 2. What seems peculiar is that the “typical UCAS scores” for students in these departments are 621, 409 and 420 respectively. To convert these into A-level scores, see here. These should represent the typical entry qualifications of students at the respective institutions.

The point is that Oxford only takes students with very high A-level grades, yet still manages to score a creditable 6/10 on “value added”.  Sussex and Cardiff have very similar scores for entry tariff, significantly lower than Oxford, but differ enormously in “value added” (9 versus 2).

The only interpretation of the latter two points that makes sense to me would be if Sussex turned out many more first-class degrees given its entry qualifications than Cardiff (since their tariff levels are similar, 409 versus 420). But this doesn’t seem to be the case;  the fraction of first-class degrees awarded by Cardiff Physics & Astronomy is broadly in line with the rest of the sector and certainly doesn’t differ by a factor of several compared to Sussex!

These aren’t the only anomalous cases. Elsewhere in the table you can find Exeter and Leeds, which have identical UCAS tariffs (435) but value added scores that differ by a wide margin (9 versus 4, respectively).

And if Oxford only accepts students with the highest A-level scores, how can it score higher on “value added” than a department like Cardiff which takes in many students with lower A-levels and turns at least some of them into first-class graduates? Shouldn’t the Oxford “value added” score be very low indeed, if any Oxford students at all fail to get first class degrees?

I think there’s a rabbit off. Can anyone explain the paradox to me?

Answers on a postcard please. Or, better, through the comments box.

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Will University Swapping Work?

Posted in Education with tags , , , , , on October 21, 2012 by telescoper

Yesterday’s crossword having been more straightforward than usual, I found myself with time to peruse the Independent newspaper at my leisure. While doing so I came across a little item describing a plan suggested by Lord Rees that students from “disadvantaged backgrounds” should be allowed to swap universities after two years of a three-year degree and transfer to a Russell group institution. Apparently this idea is based on a scheme that runs “successfully” in the University of California.

The purported aim of this is to give “a second chance” to students who didn’t do well enough at A-level to get into an “elite” university – which is laudable – but it doesn’t deal with the underlying problem, namely that our pre-university education system is a mess, for two reasons.  First, students can have the misfortune to attend a school where certain subjects are taught badly or not at all. This is a particular problem in my own field, physics. Second, the A-level examinations on which most institutions base their entry criteria do not provide a reasonable assessment of a candidate’s suitability for university study.

Because of these problems many students either don’t apply to top universities or fail to make the grades required. Such universities are reluctant to drop their grades to make special allowance because they would then get penalised in the league tables –  a high entry requirement at A-level is perceived to be a mark of quality. I’m convinced that this is a major flaw in the system. Some of the very best students I’ve had the pleasure to work with at Cardiff, for example, came in at a time when our recruitment team was struggling to meet its quota,  with modest A-level scores that would not normally have been high enough to get in. I worry a great deal about how many more talented young people there are out there who lacked that bit of luck and missed out entirely.

Lord Rees is correct in saying that it will take a very long time to fix the pre-university education system, and his proposal is an attempt to provide a sticking-plaster solution later on. If you like, it’s an admission of defeat. Elite universities will be allowed to carry on using inappropriate criteria to reject talented students applying to join the first year of a degree, but will be allowed to cherry-pick the best performers from other institutions into Year 3.

Although I think this proposal contains some good ingredients, there are several things about it that worry me. I don’t know how many students will want to move after two years in the first place. They will have made friends, formed relationships, and generally settled in at their original university and to up sticks in order to travel to another university for their final year would be very disruptive. Steps would have to be taken to ensure continuity of curriculum too. And what about the financial and other implications for the original institution, which would have to be prepared to lose an indeterminate number of its best students at the end of Year 2, with consequent impact on the quality of its graduating class?

I don’t think it’s fair for the so-called “elite” to exploit the hard work put in by other departments and institutions in order to mask its own failure to recruit appropriately. The only fair solution is to fix the university admission system, which means fixing our  broken A-levels.

And another thing. I’m shortly moving from Cardiff (which is a member of the Russell group) to Sussex (which isn’t).  Look at the league tables for Physics and tell me which one should be regarded as “elite”. Should students choose their University on the basis of which one provides the best education, or on the basis that it provides membership of a prestigious club?

On balance, I don’t think this scheme is workable in the way suggested. There is a variant, however, which I think is more promising. I think we should scrap the current confused system of 4-year undergraduate degrees (MPhys, MSci, etc) and adopt a standard system of 3-year Bachelors degrees. The next level of degree should be standalone postgraduate Masters. I’d prefer these to be two years, actually, but that’s not essential to this argument. Students could then transfer after their Bachelors’ degree into an “elite” university for their Masters if they so wish.

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Pastures New

Posted in Biographical, Education with tags , , , on October 17, 2012 by telescoper

Well, after what seems like ages the news is now official. I’ve been appointed Head of the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Sussex. I’ll be taking up my new job on 1st February 2013.  I was actually offered the job back in September and decided pretty quickly to accept it, but there have been quite a few things to sort out before the news could be made public. Anyway, yesterday the University of Sussex decided it was time to make a formal announcement, and there we are.

As I am quoted as saying in the press release it will definitely be a wrench to leave Cardiff. I’ve really enjoyed living and working here for the last five years or so, and will miss the staff and the students of the School of Physics and Astronomy at Cardiff University. I’m especially grateful for the help and support I received during the difficulties I experienced this summer. However, I felt the position at Sussex represented an exciting opportunity to make a fresh start which would offer new and exciting challenges and which I couldn’t afford to turn down. It means a lot that my Cardiff colleagues – particularly the Head of School, Walter Gear – have accepted my decision in such good spirit, and are doing everything possible to smooth the transition.

As it also explains in the official news item, I’m not exactly a stranger to Sussex. I did my DPhil there (from 1985-88) and stayed on for a couple of years as a PDRA (1988-90). That was a long time ago, of course. In fact, in those days I was  a member of a School called “MAPS” (Mathematics and Physics). I’ve been back to Sussex on numerous occasions over the past twenty-odd years, usually discovering that some reorganisation had happened – Maths separated from Physics, changes of building, and so on. Now, ironically, I’ll return to a School that, on paper at any rate, looks very similar to the old MAPS and is even back in the same building! Plus ça change.

I won’t be leaving Cardiff immediately, of course. I’m still an employee of Cardiff University and will do my best to carry out my duties until the end of January. That means I’ll carry on lecturing as normal, and will be around to mark the examinations after Christmas. I also have two PhD students and three final-year projects students, and will be travelling back to Cardiff regularly to ensure they continue get as much supervision as they need even after the (formal) end of my employment here. I’ll also be continuing to collaborate with folks in Cardiff (and elsewhere) on, e.g., the Herschel ATLAS survey.

The position of Head of MPS at Sussex only became available because of the untimely death of the previous Head of School, David Axon, in April this year, so I’m fully aware that the circumstances that have given me such a wonderful opportunity have also brought much sadness to David’s colleagues and loved ones. I only hope that I can build on the many excellent things he did during his time at Sussex, and so eventually earn the respect and acceptance of the School.

Many of my colleagues at Cardiff have expressed sadness that I’ll be leaving. But just as there are exciting developments in the pipeline at Sussex, so are there different but equally exciting things in store at Cardiff. In no way will my departure have a negative impact on the School of Physics and Astronomy at Cardiff University. Quite the contrary, in fact. There will now be a bit more headroom in the budget that I’m sure will help bring at least some of the School’s plans to fruition.

And anyway, as I said previously, I’m not going just yet. I’ll probably keep the house in Cardiff until the spring (at the earliest) so I’ll be back here regularly, especially when it’s Opera season. And having branches in both Brighton and Cardiff for a while might even give me an excuse to have two 50th birthday celebrations next year!

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How many hours per week should a graduate student work?

Posted in Biographical, Education, The Universe and Stuff with tags , on October 11, 2012 by telescoper

Here’s one of those things from Blogland that is flying around the Twittersphere today..

The original post revealed a leaked email  “sent to the entire graduate student body enrolled in the well-regarded astronomy program at Unnamed Academy” containing such gems as this:

We have received some questions about how many hours a graduate student is expected to work.  There is no easy answer, as what matters is your productivity, particularly in the form of good scientific papers.  However, if you informally canvass the faculty (those people for whose jobs you came here to train), most will tell you that they worked 80-100 hours/week in graduate school.  No one told us to work those hours, but we enjoyed what we were doing enough to want to do so.  We were almost always at the office, including at night and on weekends.

This missive has already provoked a number of responses (e.g. here and here), but I couldn’t resist putting in a few comments myself.

The first and most obvious thing is that I don’t think the faculty members mentioned above were telling the truth. It’s by no means a new phenomenon for oldies to pretend that they worked harder than the younger generation. “When I were a lad…”, etc. This is either  form of delusion that accompanies ageing or a kind of one-upmanship designed to create a impose some sort of authority over the junior members of the department.  A supervisor who demands such things of a PhD student is likely to be someone who regards a grad student simply as a form of cheap labour and doesn’t care at all about their development as a researcher or indeed as a human being.

The following sentence gives the game away

No one told us to work those hours, but we enjoyed what we were doing enough to want to do so.

It is clearly intended to mean “No one told us, but we’re sure as hell telling you…“.

My advice to a young PhD student would be: if your supervisor tells you to put in 100 hours per week on the project, find another supervisor –  because he/she clearly hasn’t put sufficient thought into the practical feasibility of your project. The fact is if you have to work 100 hours per week to get your work done you must be exceptionally inefficient or working on a stupid project or simply nuts. Or all three.

The email is correct in saying that it’s “productivity” that counts. I’m sure there are many people who can sit at their desks for 11 hours a day without producing anything very much at all. It’s not the hours that matter, but what you do with them. In no way will indulging your outside interests (sporting, cultural, political, or “other”…),   or simply relaxing, detract from your ability to do research. I think such diversions actually improve your work, as well as (of course) your general well-being.

I had plenty of outside interests (including music, sport and nightlife)  and took time out regularly to indulge them. I didn’t – and still don’t – feel any guilt about doing that. I’m not a robot. And neither are you.

In fact, I can think of many times during my graduate studies when I was completely stuck on a problem – to the extent that it was seriously bothering me. On such occasions I learned to take a break. I often found that going for a walk, doing a crossword, or just trying to think about something else for a while, allowed me to return to the problem fresher and with new ideas. I think the brain gets into a rut if you try to make it work in one mode all the time.

But there is an element of truth in the paragraph quoted above. There were indeed many times during my time as a research student – and have been since – that I worked extremely long hours. I wouldn’t say exactly that was because I “enjoyed” it, but that I wanted to know the answer and couldn’t get the problem out of my head.  I’ve stayed up into the early hours of the morning trying to finish a crossword too. Not because I had to, but because I couldn’t put it down unfinished. I know that makes me a saddo in many minds, but I think that’s the sort of obsessiveness and tenacity a researcher needs: becoming so absorbed by the task in hand that you don’t notice the passage of time.

Anyway, as  a research student I certainly didn’t work 80-100 hours per week routinely, although I might have done a few times when things were getting interesting. I think an average working week of 40 hours is perfectly fine for a PhD student, as long as you use that time efficiently and are prepared to step up a gear when motivated to do so.

It’s been a while since I last had a poll, so let’s see if we can generate some statistics on this…

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Part IB Maths for Natural Sciences, from 1984

Posted in Biographical, Education with tags , , , , on October 7, 2012 by telescoper

I’ve been rummaging through my old second-year undergraduate notes and papers trying to compare what I did when I was a student with what we’re asking current second-year undergraduates to do. Since I’m now teaching a fairly mathematical second-year course, it is interesting to look at how the content compares with the Mathematics papers I took way back in 1984.

Looking at these two examinations it’s clear that some of the content is similar (e.g. vector calculus, Fourier transforms) but some big things are entirely missing from our second-year syllabus, specifically Laplace transforms and group theory. The absence of the latter is a matter of particular regret because it’s such a beautiful subject that I think leads onto a deeper understanding of physics than a lot of the other things we make the students learn.

The other striking thing is that the marks for different bits of the questions are not given. That was standard in my day, but nowadays we usually indicate how many marks are available for each part. Moreover, the style of examination is such that even the number of correct answers needed for full marks isn’t given; it just says “You are advised to answer complete questions rather than fragments”.

Anyway, as usual, I’d be interested in comments on the content and difficulty especially from current students in the unlikely event that they have nothing better to do on a Sunday afternoon than have a look at it! For my part, I’ll be in the department getting next week’s lecture materials sorted. Heigh-ho.

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The Week’s Ending

Posted in Biographical, Education, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on October 6, 2012 by telescoper

A later post than usual for a weekend. I’ve been feeling a bit fragile all day after a very late night last night “playing Bridge” (i.e. drinking and gossiping into the early hours of the morning, with the occasional hand of cards thrown in for good measure). My broadband connection has also been playing up nearly as badly as the connections in my brain, although I don’t think there’s a causal relationship between the two. Anyway, just time for a round-up of, and some reflections on, the events of the past seven days.

This has been the first week of term, so has naturally been extremely busy. I got my first week’s second-year lectures, examples sheets and handouts together last Sunday for a 9am start on Monday morning. There were 104 students on the register, and I was delighted to find that 100 of them actually showed up bright and early for the first session. The lecture wasn’t brilliant unfortunately – I misjudged how many worked examples I could fit into an hour and got a bit rushed as a consequence. Still, at least nobody threw anything at me, and I survived. At the end of the week the students were asked to hand in solutions to some problems, which most of them seem to have done. Unfortunately, however, I neglected to ask for the key to the box in which they are posted before the support staff went home at 5pm, so the scripts are still all in the box. At least that gives me an excuse for not having started to mark them yet.

I gave another lecture this week to the 4-th year Cardiff students taking the Quantum Field Theory lectures from Swansea, to try and fill in a bit of background our lot won’t have learned in other lectures on relativistic quantum mechanics, chiefly the Dirac equation. I really love that sort of stuff, so didn’t mind stepping up to do an impromptu class on it. They seemed to find it reasonably useful, although I went on a bit longer than I should.

Two other events this week in the School were a colloquium by Dr Anupam Mazumdar from Lancaster on Wednesday and a seminar by Prof. Pedro Ferreira from Oxford yesterday (Friday), both of which were related to alternative theories of gravity (i.e. modifications of Einstein’s theory of general relativity). Pedro has co-authored a comprehensive review article on such things if anyone is interested in following up the details. The basic point, however, is that standard cosmology almost all develops from the assumption that gravity and space-time are described by general relativity. That theory is well tested on solar-system scales, but independent tests on the much larger scales involved in cosmology are hard to come by. It’s clearly therefore an important goal to work towards testing alternative theories, as is the case in any scientific discipline.

As well as these specific events there was a steady stream of problems and irritations to do with the teaching timetable: rooms too small, clashes, and so on. This is part of my responsibility as Director of Teaching and Learning in the School of Physics and Astronomy, and I don’t mind telling you that it’s a royal pain in the derrière. However, I think all the bugs have been ironed out and we can hopefully now carry on with a settled teaching programme into the new year.

Looking back on the week I can see so many things I would not long ago have found unbearably stressful, even going to the pub after Friday’s seminar.  Such victories, however insignificant they may seem to others,  have given me the confidence to face the  greater challenges that I know the future has in store.

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Lectures by Video

Posted in Education, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on October 2, 2012 by telescoper

I spent a short while this morning sitting in on a lecture from one of our fourth-year modules, on Quantum Field Theory. Nothing obviously remarkable about that, except that the lecture was in fact delivered by Prof. Graham Shore of Swansea University and I was sitting in the School of Physics & Astronomy at Cardiff University with a group of twenty or so Cardiff undergraduates.

This was the first lecture our students have received from Swansea as part of an arrangement to share some teaching. There was a plan to do it last year, but it fell apart owing to technical problems. When I took over as Director of Teaching and Learning earlier this year I was determined to make it work. I have long felt that many of our 4th-year students were losing out on some advanced topics, especially in particle physics, owing to the lack of expertise in that area here. Indeed, the lack of expertise in particle physics here in Cardiff is so extreme that our students have had to put up with being taught by me! Likewise Swansea’s undergraduates have missed out a bit on some topics we do here, especially astrophysics and gravitational physics. This division of labour dates back to the old federal University of Wales where it was decided for strategic reasons not to compete in these two areas of “big science” but to allow Cardiff to do astronomy, astrophysics and gravitational physics and Swansea the particle stuff. It was a sensible decision from a research point of view, but it meant that the two relatively small physics departments here in South Wales could offer their undergraduates more restricted choices of advanced topics  than at bigger universities.

Not for the first time, the web has furnished a solution. After a few technical problems – not entirely sorted out, to be honest – we’ve finally established a video link. The initial setup is temporary, but we will (hopefully by next week) have a permanent, high quality videoconferencing suite for future use. It will probably take some time for lecturers and students on both sides to get used to it, but sitting in this morning I found it more than satisfactory from the point of view of audibility and legibility. The only problem really is that the static camera shot makes it a bit claustrophobic. I’m not sure whether there’s a way around that without spending a fortune on multiple cameras.

Anyway, to mark this historic occasion I thought I post another video lecture on Quantum Field Theory just to give you a flavour of the content and the experience. This is by David Tong of Cambridge University as seen in a lecture recorded by the Perimeter Institute in Canada.

 

Anyway, in the spirit of openness, and because I couldn’t stay for the whole session,  I’d be interested to hear what any Cardiff students thought of the experience either in private or through the comments box..

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Credentialism and Overexamination

Posted in Biographical, Education with tags , , , , , , , , on September 30, 2012 by telescoper

Only time for a quick post this morning as I have to go into the department to get my things ready for tomorrow, when the Autumn Semester starts and I have to begin lecturing (at 9am on a Monday morning). Anyway, the text for today’s sermon is provided by Ed Smith’s Left Field column in the New Statesman, the latest issue of which I read yesterday. His topic is the rise of credentialism and the resulting excessive amount of examination in the British school system:

It is now widely accepted that British pupils are excessively over-examined. Teachers are so busy focussing on examinations that there is little time left for education. Exam-led cramming has become the year-round norm – like an election campaign that consumes the whole political cycle. Exams are obviously necessary. But there is an optimal amount of assessment and it has been far exceeded. Grade inflation – notwithstanding this year’s controversial “crackdown” – is simply accepted as a fact.

It’s well said, and it’s not just the school system that suffers from disproportionate emphasis on assessment over education. It’s rife throughout the university system too, starting with the reliance on A-level grades as criteria for assessing students’ suitability for university study, through the “modular” undergraduate degree programmes with examinations twice a year for three or four years.

We examine far too frequently and the effect of this has been to turn the entire education system into a meaningless exercise in box-ticking.

It is an unfortunate irony: in our age of credentialism, exams have never mattered more. And yet they have never been more unreliable as gauges of academic quality.

I’ve felt for some time that in my discipline, Physics (and Astronomy) A-levels are virtually useless as indicators of the suitability of a student for doing an undergraduate degree. Some of the very best students I’ve ever had the pleasure to teach came into my university with modest A-level scores; and some students who came in with perfect grades at school never adjusted to the different, more independent type of study required of an undergraduate.

As Ed Smith points out, the increased emphasis on examination grades hasn’t expanded opportunity either.  It may appear to be fairer to base university entrance or award jobs on examination results rather than, say, interviews, but this has just led to a system that can be easily gamed – private tutors, cramming, re-sits to improve grades, and so on. He rightly concludes that the “correlation between exam results and intelligence has been steadily weakening”.

So what’s the alternative? Smith mentions the admissions process at Harvard University, which famously ignores high-school grades and relies on its own interview system. Interviews can be very biased if carried out in an inappropriate way. Subjecting a young person to a 30-minute grilling  in a room with a complete stranger can be enormously stressful for applicants who are shy, and would also play into the hands of those whose educational background has involved specific training for such ordeals. But one thing I’ve found by talking to students face-to-face is that it doesn’t take very long to identify precisely those things that the examination system does not: imagination, enthusiasm for the subject,  and a flair for thinking on your feet:

One teacher told me with regret that she had to advise her most academic pupil not to display her full intellectual range: in order to secure all the ticks, first you have to stop thinking freely.

If you don’t believe this, take a look at this GCSE Science Examination. A truly intelligent student would struggle to find any correct answer for many of the questions on that paper!

This is why we still place so much emphasis on interviews in the postgraduate admissions system: we take it for granted that all applicants for PhD places will have good undergraduate degrees. What marks out an excellent candidate for a position as  research student, however, is not the ability to pass exams but a mixture of creative flair and almost obsessive determination to surmount the difficult challenges involved in independent research. The correlation between these characteristics and degree results is by no means strong.

The problem for a UK University in adopting the Harvard approach is that credentialism is now running the system. Students apply to universities largely on the basis of their predicted A-level grades, lowering their sights if their predicted grades would not be expected to get them into a more “presitigious” department. But departments that take in students with low A-level scores also get marked down in the league tables for taking in “weaker” students. We’re all aware that A-levels are basically useless, but both sides are  bound so tightly into the system that there seems to be no escape.

So what’s the answer? I don’t know if there is one, but I’d love to see what would happen if all universities abandoned A-levels and instead set their own entrance examinations and interviews. It would be a huge amount of work, but it would make a refreshing change if universities could gather useful information rather than relying on the uninformative guff produced by the national examination boards.

And here is Smith’s closing remark that rings very true to me for personal reasons,

There is a further dimension to the problem of credentialism. It encourages life’s winners to underestimate their good fortune and to over-rate the extent to which they deserve their success. Far from advancing talent over privilege, credentialism has strengthened the grip of people already at the top.

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A (Physics) Problem from the Past

Posted in Cute Problems, Education, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on September 25, 2012 by telescoper

I’ve been preparing material for my new 2nd year lecture course module The Physics of Fields and Flows, which starts next week. The idea of this is to put together some material on electromagnetism and fluid mechanics in a way that illustrates the connections between them as well as developing proficiency in the mathematics that underpins them, namely vector calculus. Anyway, in the course of putting together the notes and exercises it occurred to me to have a look at the stuff I was given when I was in the 2nd year at university, way back in 1983-4. When I opened the file I found this problem which caused me a great deal of trouble when I tried to do it all those years ago. It’s from an old Cambridge Part IB Advanced Physics paper. See what you can make of it..

(You can click on the image to make it larger…)

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Remarks on Regrading

Posted in Education, Politics with tags , , , , , , on September 24, 2012 by telescoper

I haven’t had time thus far to comment on the ongoing row about GCSE examinations, but was inspired to do a quick lunchtime postette when I read some of Chief Stooge Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg’s comments over the weekend.

It seems Mr Clegg objects to Welsh Education Minister Leighton Andrews’ decision to order the examination board WJEC to regrade GCSEs in English, as a response to a report from regulatory officials arguing that the grading process had been unfair and that it had disadvantaged students. As a result of Leighton Andrews’ intervention, over two thousand Welsh students of English have received higher grades than initially awarded.  In England, on the other hand, the regulator Ofqual decided not to regrade examinations, but to offer students the chance to resit.

Here is a statement from a spokesperson for the Welsh Government explaining the different approaches in England and Wales:

Unlike in England where responsibility for qualifications is devolved through legislation to Ofqual, in Wales the Welsh Ministers have regulatory responsibility for the qualifications taken by learners.

In requiring the regrading to take place, the Minister was fulfilling properly these regulatory responsibilities. The decision to carry out the re-grade in Wales led to the swift resolution of an injustice served to well over 2,000 Welsh candidates.

The decision to direct the WJEC to carry out this work was about fairness and ensuring that Welsh students got the grades they deserved for the work they put into their examination. The result of the re-grade was the only acceptable outcome for learners affected by a questionable grading methodology.

Candidates can now rest assured that the process used to determine their final grades was fair and just.

Nick Clegg accuses the Welsh government of “moving the goalposts” – Westminster politicians can always be relied upon to produce  a tired cliché at the drop of a hat – and accused Mr Andrews of political interference.

I think what I’m going to say may prove quite controversial with readers of this blog, but I think Leighton Andrews did the right thing. He has responsibility for regulating the examination system in Wales, and his officials told him the grades were likely to be wrong. He therefore stepped in and ordered the examinations to be  regraded. What’s the problem?

Minister for Education Michael Gove has already admitted that the grading of GCSE examinations this year was indeed unfair, but he decided not to intervene and left it up to Ofqual to decide what to do. I don’t think this because he was worried about political interference in the examination system, as he’s been all over the exam system like a rash in recent months. He decided not to intervene because he wants to kill CGSEs, and the problems this year have probably done just that.

Presumably Nick Clegg’s response to the grading errors would just have involved saying “sorry”….

But whatever the rights and wrongs of Michael Gove and Leighton Andrews, I think this episode just demonstrates what a complete mess the examination system really is.  If anyone previously thought they knew what a grade C in English was supposed to mean then the behaviour of the exam boards this year will have convinced them otherwise. Students and parents must surely now regard the whole process as arbitrary and meaningless.

It’s also a shame that we now seem to think that education is entirely about examinations and qualifications, as if tinkering with the grades that come out of one end of the process somehow means that the students have learned more.  If  more people grasped the fact that there’s much more to education than bits of paper or rankings in league tables then the power of those in authority to depress and demoralize students and teachers would be immediately diminished.

That wouldn’t solve all the problems in our education system, but it would be a start.

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