Also strange that if the pinch point is at the labs (not the testing sites), people are being told to go hundreds of miles for the test - that wouldn't make any difference.
A family member had covid symptoms a couple of weeks ago. The online booking system was farcical, it either didn't work at all; then claimed there were tests available in the nearest centre, but when you came to try and book one, there were none. Then tried to direct you to centres hundreds of miles away. Eventually they asked for a postal test, which to be fair arrived promptly the next day. However the results then took five working days to be returned.
We were incandescent, as having been in close contact with them previously, had decided to self-isolate until we knew if they were positive or not. We didn't have to do this as we had no symptoms, but clearly we could easily have been pre-or a-symptomatic, and didn't want to be responsible for spreading the virus in our community. If the testing and results had been done quickly, we would only have lost a couple of days work. As it was, it was about 10. And to be honest, if this happened again I think we might well say "sod it, we'll isolate according to the rules". And if I'm thinking that, I'm sure that many others would feel the same, so sooner or later - blam - a second wave.
The so called world beating track and trace system is fucking useless at the moment. Yet they have had 6 months or more to get it up and running properly.
Even the restaurants round here have managed to set up booking systems online where you can see what dates and times are available. Why couldn't the t and t booking system use essentially the same off the shelf software instead of something which is worse than pathetic?
I imagine that if some local labs are short on testing capacity, the system will send you to the next available catchment, wherever that is.
I already know of several people who need tests as their children have been sent home from nursery with cold symptoms, principally coughs, and told that they can't come back until it's confirmed to not be Covid. (In my experience private nurseries are often very quick about sending slightly unwell children home). This will of course only get worse as we go into autumn.
I can see schools being the same, and of course if people are to head back to the office like the government want, employers and colleagues will get very jumpy about the slightest sniffle.
I ring with someone who is an ICU consultant locally: he reckons that what will kill the hospitals this winter is having to treat all respiratory admissions as possible Covid until proven otherwise, with all the isolation precautions that entails. At least rapid testing for such cases is coming online.
It would be simpler if a local lab is short on capacity to collect the samples as normal and then send them a bit further to a lab with excess capacity. Assuming the problem isn't that all labs are running without excess capacity. As I understand it the test has two steps, both within the competence of any PhD student in an experimental bio-medical field. One a sample preparation which uses some reagents that were initially in short supply. And, then a PCR measurement on what's a piece of standard equipment present in many labs - my understanding is that it's essentially the same kit that's used by those companies who will analyse your genes and tell you how much of a Viking you are, though used in a slightly different mode. I don't know where the bottleneck is - are there insufficient staff to prepare samples, are those reagents still in short supply, are there too few PCR machines?
I suspect a shortage of PCR machines available to the government testing programme: I know that some of those locally got commandeered early on. (Not sure if they belonged to the hospital or the local university's medical/biosciences labs). Now the owners will want them back for their own testing and diagnostic work, so I imagine that there are some negotiations going on about access, and payment for that. Reading between the lines I got the impression that the new Loughborough lab that's coming onstream soon was only agreed after a bit of bargaining.
Poor little Mattie (everybody hates him, nobody loves him, so he's going into the garden to eat Worms) got a frightful wigging from the Speaker of the House of Toddlers Commons today.
I can't provide a link just now, but it's on the BBC and Guardian websites, for anyone who might be interested...
The thing now testing my Christian charity is your refusal to stay on topic; instead, you regularly make this thread about yourself, your easily triggered sense of grievance, and your propensity for blaming the victim and airily waving away problems with your supposed E-Z fixes by declaring them someone else’s responsibility to solve.
This might annoy you but it's not me who usually goes off topic. It goes off topic when people start to discuss me
Never the less, I will have to do better. I will be ignoring insults and try to give better answerts.
Oh, and this is not the proper venue for replying to Host posts. Take it to the Styx.
At least he's not channeling Trump and saying that too many positives makes him look bad.
My understanding is that people with Covid are typically at their most infectious in the day or so before they start to show symptoms. It might, however, take 2-3 days between being exposed to the virus and showing positive on the PCR test, so if you test shortly after your exposure, you might get a false negative.
This is why, if you think you have been exposed to Covid, you should isolate immediately. If you wait until you show symptoms, you've been out in public at your most infectious.
The new "6 people can meet" rule is absurd. Children can gather, unmasked, in "bubbles" of 100 or so at school, but seven people can't sit six feet apart in a circle in a field and talk. Something that is laughingly described as a "Covid-secure" wedding is OK, but someone taking exactly the same precautions in their back garden isn't. And yet playing soccer with your local soccer club is OK.
But apparently law enforcement is unable to distinguish between eight people sitting in chairs in a garden, and twenty people jumping up and down and getting sweaty in a room.
Yes - how on earth is all this going to be enforceable, anyway? Reliance on the good sense of the public doesn't seems to be a particularly robust approach...
In, very slight, defence of government policy - this reminds me of something in briefings earlier in the year. About trade offs.
Massively simplified, if R rises .2 for each 5% of normal activities you allow and you need to keep it below 1, then you have to pick *which* 25% of normal activities you permit.
So maybe the price of opening schools, offices, sport and bars - is everything else goes down the toilet.
The thing is, I’d value meeting my friends and family over returning to my office desk and a bar with strangers.
At least he's not channeling Trump and saying that too many positives makes him look bad.
My understanding is that people with Covid are typically at their most infectious in the day or so before they start to show symptoms. It might, however, take 2-3 days between being exposed to the virus and showing positive on the PCR test, so if you test shortly after your exposure, you might get a false negative.
This is why, if you think you have been exposed to Covid, you should isolate immediately. If you wait until you show symptoms, you've been out in public at your most infectious.
All true.
The new "6 people can meet" rule is absurd. Children can gather, unmasked, in "bubbles" of 100 or so at school, but seven people can't sit six feet apart in a circle in a field and talk. Something that is laughingly described as a "Covid-secure" wedding is OK, but someone taking exactly the same precautions in their back garden isn't. And yet playing soccer with your local soccer club is OK.
But apparently law enforcement is unable to distinguish between eight people sitting in chairs in a garden, and twenty people jumping up and down and getting sweaty in a room.
I don't think it would be possible to come up with rules to suit everyone. The rules change and they can be complicated. My personal rule is that if I am in doubt as to safety, I don't do it.
The thing is, I’d value meeting my friends and family over returning to my office desk and a bar with strangers.
... and there's precisely zero chance that I'll go to a bar full of strangers in the current climate, even if some useful government idiot lies that it is safe, whereas I will quite happily get together with (some of) my friends, because we're sensible people who are all avoiding risky activities, and when we get together we do things like sitting in garden chairs outside.
Max/Matt - which is the better name for this guy? (what's this topic about again?)
His given name is Matt(hew). The topic is how he is an over-promoted lickspittle whose blatant incompetence has and belike will cause more people to perish of COVID-19 than need be.
His other problem is, like Jeremy Hunt - he’d like the NHS to consist of a body commissioning private companies to provide stuff. He knows all the disadvantages of large public services and values non of the strengths.
Hence his instincts in the pandemic have been to contract out, rather than using existing public health structures to build on.
Hence the clusterfuck around test and trace, ppe purchase crap fests and his idea that the solution to everything is an app.
Hence his instincts in the pandemic have been to contract out, rather than using existing public health structures to build on.
Which is really the boring part of the whole business. I don't find "what the administrative structure looks like" terribly interesting, but if you want something to actually happen, rather than just playing paper games, then you have to have some people actually doing something. Whether they are employed by you, or by a contractor, is of secondary interest to what they actually do.
True but public health england and local councils already had experienced contact tracers - giving it to rando company to hire rando folk with no experience was not surprisingly quite shit in outcome.
The entire public service sector has a resilience structure etc, and it may have been badly eroded by underfunding, but they could have pumped money and resources into it at the point they noticed the problem - rather than fire hosing public money at every chancer who happened to email a minister.
(“Move fast and break things” might conceivably work for a tech start up - it is less effective for survival critical national systems.)
In, very slight, defence of government policy - this reminds me of something in briefings earlier in the year. About trade offs.
Massively simplified, if R rises .2 for each 5% of normal activities you allow and you need to keep it below 1, then you have to pick *which* 25% of normal activities you permit.
So maybe the price of opening schools, offices, sport and bars - is everything else goes down the toilet.
This is what Chris Whitty signaled a couple of weeks ago when he said that they were at outer edges of what was possible regarding lifting the lockdown and anything further would need to be compensated for by tigthening restrictions elsewhere.
That said, unless you have very good and precise data and a very clear comunications strategy, the best strategy will always be policies that are fairly broad and consistent.
What we have at the moment is neither, and the impression given is that Cummings et al are trying to long-screwdriver everything in the absence of either data or the ability to communicate.
True but public health england and local councils already had experienced contact tracers - giving it to rando company to hire rando folk with no experience was not surprisingly quite shit in outcome.
Oh, I agree with you, but more because "we already have people that do that" than because of something inherently wrong with contractors. Go where the expertise is. Glossy brochures and consultants are worthless. Competence is everything.
the best strategy will always be policies that are fairly broad and consistent.
Yes. And a policy that says that you can spend all day sitting unmasked in a classroom with a group of people, but can't spend an hour sitting in a garden with them is neither.
If I were making policy in the current state of knowledge I would say:
Mask if you outside your home
maintain 2m distance
work from home if possible
continue furlough or introduce UBI to the end of the financial year then review - likely continue till the end of first phase of the vaccine rollout
stop talking about bubbles it has become far too confusing
create an alert system related to case rate, with a set of of clear interventions for each level
unify approach across the U.K. by moving at the pace of the most cautious administration - or creating a shared UK ‘cobra’ for the pandemic with collective responsibility
create an educational and childcare plan - that assumes that we will not hold public exams until 2022, and that remote schooling will be necessary regularly for a long period. Talk to governments who have been managing this since the dawn of time like Australia
paid sick leave for all workers, and "pressing necessity" leave for people who must look after others
I do not understand the preoccupation with what I'll call "uniform school-leaving exams" in the UK. I'd probably revise and do away with them. They were called "departmental exams" when I was young, same exam for all in every subject on highschool graduation (department of education exams). Because they stressed people out and did not predict future academic nor job performance very well at all they were discarded more than 35 years ago in favour of certifying adequate education prep for post-secondary via educational standards being uniform in the province, and having university entrance be competitive for undergraduates only to the point of requiring a minimum score for first year registration. Of course there are also virtually no private schools at all here and the public education system is excellent. All schools are considered the same, mainly because to do else is unfair.
the best strategy will always be policies that are fairly broad and consistent.
Yes. And a policy that says that you can spend all day sitting unmasked in a classroom with a group of people, but can't spend an hour sitting in a garden with them is neither.
Yes, it's pretty clear they are trying to balance by economic activity (which is not completely unreasonable), but at the same time they are also indulging in the kind of exceptionalism that leads to a greater premium being put on policies that don't look like those adopted elsewhere -- leading to the kind of thing i described above.
Because they stressed people out and did not predict future academic nor job performance very well at all
I can't speak to job performance, but A Level grades are a very good predictor of future academic performance in the UK. The lower your A Level grades, the more likely you are to drop out or get a lower-ranked degree.
they were discarded more than 35 years ago in favour of certifying adequate education prep for post-secondary via educational standards being uniform in the province, and having university entrance be competitive for undergraduates only to the point of requiring a minimum score for first year registration.
Introducing such a system in the UK would be catastrophic for the whole Higher Education sector. Firstly, for the most part students aren't competing for the best universities half as much as universities are competing for the best students. University rankings are overwhelmingly driven by graduate employment outcomes, student completion percentages, and student entry qualifications, all of which combine with the fact that better A Levels indicate higher likelihood of doing well in those measures to mean that universities need to get the best students they can in at the start in order to improve and/or maintain their position in future league tables. League table position drives reputation, which drives income - especially through its influence on how many all-important overseas students there are to bring in the real money. Remove universities ability to select the best students and you make the league tables, rankings, reputation and thus income an absolute crapshoot.
Secondly, without A Levels to rank, sort and sift applicants universities will have no way to ensure a reasonably consistent level of ability within their student cohorts. This would inevitably mean lecturers having to do far more remedial work with their less-able students, at the cost of teaching time for the more able.
Thirdly, as universities would have no reasonable way to choose which of their applicants to actually recruit there would also be no way for applicants to guarantee which university they went to. It would essentially have to be determined at random, so you could apply for Oxford but end up being placed at Wolverhampton.
But, the question isn't "are A level grades a good indicator of academic performance" (they clearly are, but it's equally clear that they're a lot less good as indicators of non-academic ability that would be more important in the workplace), but whether the current method of assessing a students ability by cramming everything into a set of exams held over a few days in May at the end is the best way to award A level grades.
Even as a predictor of university performance it's a measure that differs from how universities themselves work. Do any courses still assess entirely by exams at the end of the final year? My experience is that the vast majority have end of semester exams (so that splits the exams into two groups) and that the penultimate year marks are also used as well as the final year. Even within a single module it's likely that there will be some level of continual assessment in addition to the exam. Most university courses will include significant elements of essay writing or lab practicals (depending, of course, on the course), these are skills that are not developed if the aim is only to sit and pass an exam - whereas an A level grade that also includes continual assessment will incentivise students to develop those skills to get better grades (and discourage teachers to only teach 'how to pass the exam', which is pretty dumb in the long term but understandable in a climate where everything comes down to that exam - for the student and the school).
Do any courses still assess entirely by exams at the end of the final year?
The child of a friend is reading Modern* Languages at Oxford. My information is that, whilst there exists an optional extended essay that is offered by some students, the remainder of the papers are all finals set at the end of the final year. From what I gather, this is a normal pattern among his peers for the humanities, whereas the scientists find their final exams split in two (third and fourth years) in order to accommodate the three year BA and the four-year MChem/MPhys/MWhatever.
ETA: It's Oxford, so I think the most modern thing he has actually read is Moliere.
But, the question isn't "are A level grades a good indicator of academic performance" (they clearly are, but it's equally clear that they're a lot less good as indicators of non-academic ability that would be more important in the workplace), but whether the current method of assessing a students ability by cramming everything into a set of exams held over a few days in May at the end is the best way to award A level grades.
I have no idea. All I'm saying is that the A Level system as currently implemented is a good predictor of future academic performance. If implemented differently it might be better or it might be worse.
Even as a predictor of university performance it's a measure that differs from how universities themselves work.
Perhaps. But the fact remains that regardless of those differences it is a good predictor of university performance.
I'm more familiar with the exams which are required in many places to go to graduate or professional schools, like the GRE and MCAT. As well as professional licensing exams. They predict almost nothing, and basically are allowed because they "look rational" and "should logically reference relevant criteria", or something like that. I did a search for "do UK A level exams predict anything" and came up with results that say yes, yes somewhat, and no not at all. Have they collected systematic data at all? The most comprehensive data appeared to be that the A levels and GSCE exams mean about zero by the time people are in medical or dental school.
The most comprehensive data appeared to be that the A levels and GSCE exams mean about zero by the time people are in medical or dental school.
...and almost everyone in medical or dental school has a clutch of As at A-level, because if you don't get straight As, you don't get admitted. If you're trying to build a case that C students make good doctors, too, then I think you are over-reaching by quite a considerable distance.
The most comprehensive data appeared to be that the A levels and GSCE exams mean about zero by the time people are in medical or dental school.
...and almost everyone in medical or dental school has a clutch of As at A-level, because if you don't get straight As, you don't get admitted. If you're trying to build a case that C students make good doctors, too, then I think you are over-reaching by quite a considerable distance.
There are outliers - I used to know someone with a PhD in Maths from a well-regarded institution who got (as I remember) a B and a D at A-level. I currently know at least one eminent scientist, with a number of international honours to their name, who has very pedestrian A-level grades. But these people are exceptions.
(The former came from a bad school and had bad teaching. The latter spent A-levels partying and riding motorbikes, but then got serious.)
Not that I'm allowed to share with you, sorry. Calculations concerning what entry grades the university will require, and the basis on which those calculations are made, is pretty much the dictionary definition of Commercial In Confidence. If you choose to disbelieve me on that basis there's little I can do about it.
Also, bear in mind that I'm in a high-ranking Russell Group university so what may be a solid relationship between entry grades and outcomes at our end of the market may be less solid at the other end where entry qualifications are considerably lower but (some) students still end up graduating (though there are those who might say that's because academic standards are a touch lower and less rigorous at those institutions).
The most comprehensive data appeared to be that the A levels and GSCE exams mean about zero by the time people are in medical or dental school.
Most GCSEs don't mean shit three seconds after they've been awarded. As for medical schools, most of them (a) won't take any student with less than three As at A Level anyway, and (b) are geared up to weed out any students who don't have what it takes in the first couple of years, way before they ever set foot in a hospital.
The most comprehensive data appeared to be that the A levels and GSCE exams mean about zero by the time people are in medical or dental school.
...and almost everyone in medical or dental school has a clutch of As at A-level, because if you don't get straight As, you don't get admitted. If you're trying to build a case that C students make good doctors, too, then I think you are over-reaching by quite a considerable distance.
There are outliers - I used to know someone with a PhD in Maths from a well-regarded institution who got (as I remember) a B and a D at A-level. I currently know at least one eminent scientist, with a number of international honours to their name, who has very pedestrian A-level grades. But these people are exceptions.
(The former came from a bad school and had bad teaching. The latter spent A-levels partying and riding motorbikes, but then got serious.)
That's why most medical schools run graduate-entry versions of their courses for applicants who didn't get the A Levels but have since proved their ability by getting a degree.
Of course, all predictors - no matter how good - will have outliers at both ends of the spectrum.
The most comprehensive data appeared to be that the A levels and GSCE exams mean about zero by the time people are in medical or dental school.
...and almost everyone in medical or dental school has a clutch of As at A-level, because if you don't get straight As, you don't get admitted. If you're trying to build a case that C students make good doctors, too, then I think you are over-reaching by quite a considerable distance.
No. We're discussing something quite different: whether standardized testing for high school students is actually a reasonable idea, and whether it actually predicts anything much.
The university undergrad admission level is set via a grade point average here. It's usually somewhere in the 75% average in the matriculated subjects. And then they basically start you over at univ. If you didn't finish high school, you can still be admitted to university, but you have to show performance at univ in a limited number of classes. I have 2 colleagues with PhDs who left school and returned to university as "mature students". I performed poorly the last 2 years of highschool myself, due to what I'll say were "psycho-social issues". Sounds like this is more common here.
Med schools, graduate schools etc here continue to include interviews and references as part of admissions processes.
@Marvin the Martian
I've no idea what "Commercial In Confidence" means. Search suggests contract law. Here they publish the minimum matriculated high school average (grades 10, 11 and 12 marks in university-relevant subjects) that gain entry to a general arts & sciences program. Covid has resulted in the largest first year univ student body ever.
Probably the main differences here are: all elementary schools (grades 1-8) and high schools (grade 9-12) must adhere to the provincial Ministry of Education curriculum, and that the two academic universities are provincially chartered by acts of the legislature and are public. I noted that we have basically almost zero private schools nor special schools. The schools are responsible to elected school boards and to the Ministry of Education. So quite uniform.
Re c in confidence, that to Marvin. it's a bit like asking you (or your accountant) what evidence of the tax aspects of running a typical small business they have.
Re c in confidence, that to Marvin. it's a bit like asking you (or your accountant) what evidence of the tax aspects of running a typical small business they have.
In Marvin's case I expect he can only really talk about one university. So in the analogy asking for details of the taxes of a typical small business from an accountant who deals with just one small business (and, it's known what business that is).
The university undergrad admission level is set via a grade point average here. It's usually somewhere in the 75% average in the matriculated subjects.
In the UK, admissions requirements vary both by university and by course. The top universities typically require AAA or better. Medicine anywhere requires top grades. Lower down the tree, you can get on to an unpopular course at a middle-rank university with a couple of mediocre passes, because the university wants to fill its places, but to get on a popular course at the same institution, you might need more like ABB.
Plus, of course, different degree courses will have different subject requirements. If you want to read French, you'll be expected to have A-level French. If you want to read Physics, you'll need Maths and Physics.
(For Americans wishing to compare, my understanding is that UK universities tend to treat a grade 5 in an AP class as being roughly worth an A grade at A-level. Marvin might be able to comment.)
I noted that we [in Saskatchewan] have basically almost zero private schools nor special schools. The schools are responsible to elected school boards and to the Ministry of Education. So quite uniform.
Every time you post your claim that Saskatchewan is an egalitarian paradise - socially or educationally - it reminds me of those Soviet propaganda posters, in which the women are all strong and the men are all courageous. As propaganda, it's about as convincing. I mean, I suppose I admire your commitment to this schtick, but it's only schtick AFAIC.
Of course you have private schools in Saskatchewan! Anecdotally: I'm typing this a few km away from a former staff person who worked at LCBI (private school in Outlook, SK) and one of my best friends went to Luther College (private school in Regina, SK). Google also reminded me of Briercrest College, and there seem to be assorted Montessori schools too.
Of course you have special schools in Saskatchewan! There are Catholic schools and schools on First Nations, with their own administrations. Competition to get into the "good", "specialized" public schools also exists, though I don't want to get into personally identifying info about that.
The results of education in SK: not excellence, according to the Conference Board of Canada, which gets a "D" while Alberta, Ontario, and BC get "B". Link here https://conferenceboard.ca/hcp/provincial/education.aspx?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1 It's fair enough to criticize the source as being business-biased. Perhaps you meant "excellence" in some other way: not in academia or business prosperity, but in producing decent human beings, in which I would acknowledge SK does a pretty good job overall.
I did not do well at school and not as good as I could have at FE college because I was bullied and an undiagnosed dyslexic. I have a BA hons from the Open University.
Let me direct everyone's attention to figure 2 in the document that Doublethink links here. You see a strong correlation between A-level results and probability of getting a good degree result; you also see that students from the "top 20%" of schools do a little worse than students from other schools with the same A-levels. It looks from this plot as though attending a "top 20%" school is worth a single grade at A-level (ie. you might expect BBC vs BCC) once you drop below the straight-A students.
Looking further down the document, you could be persuaded that attending an independent (fee-paying) school is worth two grades at A-level once you get below the top grades. This is a measure of the extent to which fee-paying schools do a better job of preparing adequate students for exams.
It would be simpler if a local lab is short on capacity to collect the samples as normal and then send them a bit further to a lab with excess capacity. Assuming the problem isn't that all labs are running without excess capacity. As I understand it the test has two steps, both within the competence of any PhD student in an experimental bio-medical field. One a sample preparation which uses some reagents that were initially in short supply. And, then a PCR measurement on what's a piece of standard equipment present in many labs - my understanding is that it's essentially the same kit that's used by those companies who will analyse your genes and tell you how much of a Viking you are, though used in a slightly different mode. I don't know where the bottleneck is - are there insufficient staff to prepare samples, are those reagents still in short supply, are there too few PCR machines?
Let me direct everyone's attention to figure 2 in the document that Doublethink links here. You see a strong correlation between A-level results and probability of getting a good degree result; you also see that students from the "top 20%" of schools do a little worse than students from other schools with the same A-levels. It looks from this plot as though attending a "top 20%" school is worth a single grade at A-level (ie. you might expect BBC vs BCC) once you drop below the straight-A students.
Looking further down the document, you could be persuaded that attending an independent (fee-paying) school is worth two grades at A-level once you get below the top grades. This is a measure of the extent to which fee-paying schools do a better job of preparing adequate students for exams.
Looking further down the document, you could be persuaded that attending an independent (fee-paying) school is worth two grades at A-level once you get below the top grades. This is a measure of the extent to which fee-paying schools do a better job of preparing adequate students for exams.
Post hoc ergo proctor hoc fallacy. Could just as easily be that students at private schools have, on average, more parental encouragement and expectation to succeed. More likely it's a combination of the two - a student at a state school is more likely to have developed the intrinsic motivation required for university study while an independent school student is more likely to have relied on extrinsic motivation.
It's ages since I've looked at this but it does seem to fit with what I remember...
1) A-level results do correlate with degree performance but
2) There is a difference between state schools and fee-paying schools. I.e. a student with a specific set of A-levels will, on average, outperform a student with the same results in a fee-paying school.
Given that admissions should be about future potential, there was the logical argument a few years ago that universities should calibrate their offers according to the schooling of the candidate. IIRC, this was slaughtered in the press. It should be noted that our print media is dominated by people who both went to fee-paying schools themselves and send their own children to them. I suspect the clear bias in reporting is unconscious but it is absolutely real, in my view.
It does make sense, someone who jumps 6ft from flat ground is probably capable of jumping higher than someone who jumps 6ft from a springboard.
But it does bring into question what you, as a society, want university to be for. Should it be for the “best” x%, or should it be for anyone who is capable of benefiting from it - will we function better as a society with a more educated populace ? For example, will people with training in data analysis and critical thinking to high level be less likely to be conned by propaganda or understand public health messages, or lead more fulfilled lives ? Or is it primarily about trying to match vocational skills to jobs ? Or something else ?
Given that admissions should be about future potential, there was the logical argument a few years ago that universities should calibrate their offers according to the schooling of the candidate. IIRC, this was slaughtered in the press. It should be noted that our print media is dominated by people who both went to fee-paying schools themselves and send their own children to them. I suspect the clear bias in reporting is unconscious but it is absolutely real, in my view.
AFZ
When my son applied to uni just over a year ago, one of the unis sent a second, one grade lower, offer out to him because of his postcode. We could only assume that they had identified that we live on a council estate.
It was somewhat surprising as we live in Cambridge and he went to the top state sixth form college in the country. The council estate I live on has nothing in common with the one in Luton I was brought up on.
Looking further down the document, you could be persuaded that attending an independent (fee-paying) school is worth two grades at A-level once you get below the top grades. This is a measure of the extent to which fee-paying schools do a better job of preparing adequate students for exams.
Post hoc ergo proctor hoc fallacy. Could just as easily be that students at private schools have, on average, more parental encouragement and expectation to succeed. More likely it's a combination of the two - a student at a state school is more likely to have developed the intrinsic motivation required for university study while an independent school student is more likely to have relied on extrinsic motivation.
It's a feature, however it's arrived at. In my time at university, those from state schools tended to do the work unbidden, while those from private schools were much more used to being told what to do. Unsurprisingly, university lecturers (and post-graduates) are not the hand-holding variety.
But it does bring into question what you, as a society, want university to be for. Should it be for the “best” x%, or should it be for anyone who is capable of benefiting from it - will we function better as a society with a more educated populace ? For example, will people with training in data analysis and critical thinking to high level be less likely to be conned by propaganda or understand public health messages, or lead more fulfilled lives ? Or is it primarily about trying to match vocational skills to jobs ? Or something else ?
And if many people can benefit from university, but some of the people only benefit a little bit, is investing in those people a better use of public funds than smaller class sizes in KS1, for example?
I suspect that our society has too firmly embedded both university-as-status-indicator and university-as-signalling that it's unable to have a real discussion about what education should look like, and whether our current university model is optimal either for the small fraction of the population that it served 50 years ago, or the expanded clientele that it serves now.
Are many undergraduates actually trained in "data analysis and critical thinking", for example? Does the ability to read and analyze Villon, or make puns in Latin help with that? Do you teach people to think, or just to look through the book until they find an equation with the right symbols in?
I guess one of the underlying questions is: If A-Level results predict performance at universities, is that because A-Levels and university courses are testing approximately the same things, and, if so, are those things the sort of things we want to test or should be valuing?
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Strange that defunding infrastructure for a decade leaves you with less infrastructure ..
A family member had covid symptoms a couple of weeks ago. The online booking system was farcical, it either didn't work at all; then claimed there were tests available in the nearest centre, but when you came to try and book one, there were none. Then tried to direct you to centres hundreds of miles away. Eventually they asked for a postal test, which to be fair arrived promptly the next day. However the results then took five working days to be returned.
We were incandescent, as having been in close contact with them previously, had decided to self-isolate until we knew if they were positive or not. We didn't have to do this as we had no symptoms, but clearly we could easily have been pre-or a-symptomatic, and didn't want to be responsible for spreading the virus in our community. If the testing and results had been done quickly, we would only have lost a couple of days work. As it was, it was about 10. And to be honest, if this happened again I think we might well say "sod it, we'll isolate according to the rules". And if I'm thinking that, I'm sure that many others would feel the same, so sooner or later - blam - a second wave.
The so called world beating track and trace system is fucking useless at the moment. Yet they have had 6 months or more to get it up and running properly.
Even the restaurants round here have managed to set up booking systems online where you can see what dates and times are available. Why couldn't the t and t booking system use essentially the same off the shelf software instead of something which is worse than pathetic?
I already know of several people who need tests as their children have been sent home from nursery with cold symptoms, principally coughs, and told that they can't come back until it's confirmed to not be Covid. (In my experience private nurseries are often very quick about sending slightly unwell children home). This will of course only get worse as we go into autumn.
I can see schools being the same, and of course if people are to head back to the office like the government want, employers and colleagues will get very jumpy about the slightest sniffle.
I ring with someone who is an ICU consultant locally: he reckons that what will kill the hospitals this winter is having to treat all respiratory admissions as possible Covid until proven otherwise, with all the isolation precautions that entails. At least rapid testing for such cases is coming online.
I can't provide a link just now, but it's on the BBC and Guardian websites, for anyone who might be interested...
At least he's not channeling Trump and saying that too many positives makes him look bad.
My understanding is that people with Covid are typically at their most infectious in the day or so before they start to show symptoms. It might, however, take 2-3 days between being exposed to the virus and showing positive on the PCR test, so if you test shortly after your exposure, you might get a false negative.
This is why, if you think you have been exposed to Covid, you should isolate immediately. If you wait until you show symptoms, you've been out in public at your most infectious.
The new "6 people can meet" rule is absurd. Children can gather, unmasked, in "bubbles" of 100 or so at school, but seven people can't sit six feet apart in a circle in a field and talk. Something that is laughingly described as a "Covid-secure" wedding is OK, but someone taking exactly the same precautions in their back garden isn't. And yet playing soccer with your local soccer club is OK.
But apparently law enforcement is unable to distinguish between eight people sitting in chairs in a garden, and twenty people jumping up and down and getting sweaty in a room.
Massively simplified, if R rises .2 for each 5% of normal activities you allow and you need to keep it below 1, then you have to pick *which* 25% of normal activities you permit.
So maybe the price of opening schools, offices, sport and bars - is everything else goes down the toilet.
The thing is, I’d value meeting my friends and family over returning to my office desk and a bar with strangers.
I don't think it would be possible to come up with rules to suit everyone. The rules change and they can be complicated. My personal rule is that if I am in doubt as to safety, I don't do it.
... and there's precisely zero chance that I'll go to a bar full of strangers in the current climate, even if some useful government idiot lies that it is safe, whereas I will quite happily get together with (some of) my friends, because we're sensible people who are all avoiding risky activities, and when we get together we do things like sitting in garden chairs outside.
His given name is Matt(hew). The topic is how he is an over-promoted lickspittle whose blatant incompetence has and belike will cause more people to perish of COVID-19 than need be.
Hence his instincts in the pandemic have been to contract out, rather than using existing public health structures to build on.
Hence the clusterfuck around test and trace, ppe purchase crap fests and his idea that the solution to everything is an app.
Which is really the boring part of the whole business. I don't find "what the administrative structure looks like" terribly interesting, but if you want something to actually happen, rather than just playing paper games, then you have to have some people actually doing something. Whether they are employed by you, or by a contractor, is of secondary interest to what they actually do.
The entire public service sector has a resilience structure etc, and it may have been badly eroded by underfunding, but they could have pumped money and resources into it at the point they noticed the problem - rather than fire hosing public money at every chancer who happened to email a minister.
(“Move fast and break things” might conceivably work for a tech start up - it is less effective for survival critical national systems.)
This is what Chris Whitty signaled a couple of weeks ago when he said that they were at outer edges of what was possible regarding lifting the lockdown and anything further would need to be compensated for by tigthening restrictions elsewhere.
That said, unless you have very good and precise data and a very clear comunications strategy, the best strategy will always be policies that are fairly broad and consistent.
What we have at the moment is neither, and the impression given is that Cummings et al are trying to long-screwdriver everything in the absence of either data or the ability to communicate.
Oh, I agree with you, but more because "we already have people that do that" than because of something inherently wrong with contractors. Go where the expertise is. Glossy brochures and consultants are worthless. Competence is everything.
Yes. And a policy that says that you can spend all day sitting unmasked in a classroom with a group of people, but can't spend an hour sitting in a garden with them is neither.
I do not understand the preoccupation with what I'll call "uniform school-leaving exams" in the UK. I'd probably revise and do away with them. They were called "departmental exams" when I was young, same exam for all in every subject on highschool graduation (department of education exams). Because they stressed people out and did not predict future academic nor job performance very well at all they were discarded more than 35 years ago in favour of certifying adequate education prep for post-secondary via educational standards being uniform in the province, and having university entrance be competitive for undergraduates only to the point of requiring a minimum score for first year registration. Of course there are also virtually no private schools at all here and the public education system is excellent. All schools are considered the same, mainly because to do else is unfair.
Yes, it's pretty clear they are trying to balance by economic activity (which is not completely unreasonable), but at the same time they are also indulging in the kind of exceptionalism that leads to a greater premium being put on policies that don't look like those adopted elsewhere -- leading to the kind of thing i described above.
I can't speak to job performance, but A Level grades are a very good predictor of future academic performance in the UK. The lower your A Level grades, the more likely you are to drop out or get a lower-ranked degree.
Introducing such a system in the UK would be catastrophic for the whole Higher Education sector. Firstly, for the most part students aren't competing for the best universities half as much as universities are competing for the best students. University rankings are overwhelmingly driven by graduate employment outcomes, student completion percentages, and student entry qualifications, all of which combine with the fact that better A Levels indicate higher likelihood of doing well in those measures to mean that universities need to get the best students they can in at the start in order to improve and/or maintain their position in future league tables. League table position drives reputation, which drives income - especially through its influence on how many all-important overseas students there are to bring in the real money. Remove universities ability to select the best students and you make the league tables, rankings, reputation and thus income an absolute crapshoot.
Secondly, without A Levels to rank, sort and sift applicants universities will have no way to ensure a reasonably consistent level of ability within their student cohorts. This would inevitably mean lecturers having to do far more remedial work with their less-able students, at the cost of teaching time for the more able.
Thirdly, as universities would have no reasonable way to choose which of their applicants to actually recruit there would also be no way for applicants to guarantee which university they went to. It would essentially have to be determined at random, so you could apply for Oxford but end up being placed at Wolverhampton.
Even as a predictor of university performance it's a measure that differs from how universities themselves work. Do any courses still assess entirely by exams at the end of the final year? My experience is that the vast majority have end of semester exams (so that splits the exams into two groups) and that the penultimate year marks are also used as well as the final year. Even within a single module it's likely that there will be some level of continual assessment in addition to the exam. Most university courses will include significant elements of essay writing or lab practicals (depending, of course, on the course), these are skills that are not developed if the aim is only to sit and pass an exam - whereas an A level grade that also includes continual assessment will incentivise students to develop those skills to get better grades (and discourage teachers to only teach 'how to pass the exam', which is pretty dumb in the long term but understandable in a climate where everything comes down to that exam - for the student and the school).
The child of a friend is reading Modern* Languages at Oxford. My information is that, whilst there exists an optional extended essay that is offered by some students, the remainder of the papers are all finals set at the end of the final year. From what I gather, this is a normal pattern among his peers for the humanities, whereas the scientists find their final exams split in two (third and fourth years) in order to accommodate the three year BA and the four-year MChem/MPhys/MWhatever.
ETA: It's Oxford, so I think the most modern thing he has actually read is Moliere.
I have no idea. All I'm saying is that the A Level system as currently implemented is a good predictor of future academic performance. If implemented differently it might be better or it might be worse.
Perhaps. But the fact remains that regardless of those differences it is a good predictor of university performance.
I'm more familiar with the exams which are required in many places to go to graduate or professional schools, like the GRE and MCAT. As well as professional licensing exams. They predict almost nothing, and basically are allowed because they "look rational" and "should logically reference relevant criteria", or something like that. I did a search for "do UK A level exams predict anything" and came up with results that say yes, yes somewhat, and no not at all. Have they collected systematic data at all? The most comprehensive data appeared to be that the A levels and GSCE exams mean about zero by the time people are in medical or dental school.
...and almost everyone in medical or dental school has a clutch of As at A-level, because if you don't get straight As, you don't get admitted. If you're trying to build a case that C students make good doctors, too, then I think you are over-reaching by quite a considerable distance.
There are outliers - I used to know someone with a PhD in Maths from a well-regarded institution who got (as I remember) a B and a D at A-level. I currently know at least one eminent scientist, with a number of international honours to their name, who has very pedestrian A-level grades. But these people are exceptions.
(The former came from a bad school and had bad teaching. The latter spent A-levels partying and riding motorbikes, but then got serious.)
Not that I'm allowed to share with you, sorry. Calculations concerning what entry grades the university will require, and the basis on which those calculations are made, is pretty much the dictionary definition of Commercial In Confidence. If you choose to disbelieve me on that basis there's little I can do about it.
Also, bear in mind that I'm in a high-ranking Russell Group university so what may be a solid relationship between entry grades and outcomes at our end of the market may be less solid at the other end where entry qualifications are considerably lower but (some) students still end up graduating (though there are those who might say that's because academic standards are a touch lower and less rigorous at those institutions).
Most GCSEs don't mean shit three seconds after they've been awarded. As for medical schools, most of them (a) won't take any student with less than three As at A Level anyway, and (b) are geared up to weed out any students who don't have what it takes in the first couple of years, way before they ever set foot in a hospital.
That's why most medical schools run graduate-entry versions of their courses for applicants who didn't get the A Levels but have since proved their ability by getting a degree.
Of course, all predictors - no matter how good - will have outliers at both ends of the spectrum.
The university undergrad admission level is set via a grade point average here. It's usually somewhere in the 75% average in the matriculated subjects. And then they basically start you over at univ. If you didn't finish high school, you can still be admitted to university, but you have to show performance at univ in a limited number of classes. I have 2 colleagues with PhDs who left school and returned to university as "mature students". I performed poorly the last 2 years of highschool myself, due to what I'll say were "psycho-social issues". Sounds like this is more common here.
Med schools, graduate schools etc here continue to include interviews and references as part of admissions processes.
@Marvin the Martian
I've no idea what "Commercial In Confidence" means. Search suggests contract law. Here they publish the minimum matriculated high school average (grades 10, 11 and 12 marks in university-relevant subjects) that gain entry to a general arts & sciences program. Covid has resulted in the largest first year univ student body ever.
Probably the main differences here are: all elementary schools (grades 1-8) and high schools (grade 9-12) must adhere to the provincial Ministry of Education curriculum, and that the two academic universities are provincially chartered by acts of the legislature and are public. I noted that we have basically almost zero private schools nor special schools. The schools are responsible to elected school boards and to the Ministry of Education. So quite uniform.
it was the not necessarily wanting/being able to post all the data (/company accounts)
In the UK, admissions requirements vary both by university and by course. The top universities typically require AAA or better. Medicine anywhere requires top grades. Lower down the tree, you can get on to an unpopular course at a middle-rank university with a couple of mediocre passes, because the university wants to fill its places, but to get on a popular course at the same institution, you might need more like ABB.
Plus, of course, different degree courses will have different subject requirements. If you want to read French, you'll be expected to have A-level French. If you want to read Physics, you'll need Maths and Physics.
(For Americans wishing to compare, my understanding is that UK universities tend to treat a grade 5 in an AP class as being roughly worth an A grade at A-level. Marvin might be able to comment.)
Every time you post your claim that Saskatchewan is an egalitarian paradise - socially or educationally - it reminds me of those Soviet propaganda posters, in which the women are all strong and the men are all courageous. As propaganda, it's about as convincing. I mean, I suppose I admire your commitment to this schtick, but it's only schtick AFAIC.
Of course you have private schools in Saskatchewan! Anecdotally: I'm typing this a few km away from a former staff person who worked at LCBI (private school in Outlook, SK) and one of my best friends went to Luther College (private school in Regina, SK). Google also reminded me of Briercrest College, and there seem to be assorted Montessori schools too.
Of course you have special schools in Saskatchewan! There are Catholic schools and schools on First Nations, with their own administrations. Competition to get into the "good", "specialized" public schools also exists, though I don't want to get into personally identifying info about that.
The results of education in SK: not excellence, according to the Conference Board of Canada, which gets a "D" while Alberta, Ontario, and BC get "B". Link here https://conferenceboard.ca/hcp/provincial/education.aspx?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1 It's fair enough to criticize the source as being business-biased. Perhaps you meant "excellence" in some other way: not in academia or business prosperity, but in producing decent human beings, in which I would acknowledge SK does a pretty good job overall.
Thank you for that! Pages 9 and 10 show what I’ve been talking about.
Let me direct everyone's attention to figure 2 in the document that Doublethink links here. You see a strong correlation between A-level results and probability of getting a good degree result; you also see that students from the "top 20%" of schools do a little worse than students from other schools with the same A-levels. It looks from this plot as though attending a "top 20%" school is worth a single grade at A-level (ie. you might expect BBC vs BCC) once you drop below the straight-A students.
Looking further down the document, you could be persuaded that attending an independent (fee-paying) school is worth two grades at A-level once you get below the top grades. This is a measure of the extent to which fee-paying schools do a better job of preparing adequate students for exams.
To be honest, it's
This I think is the key finding.
Post hoc ergo proctor hoc fallacy. Could just as easily be that students at private schools have, on average, more parental encouragement and expectation to succeed. More likely it's a combination of the two - a student at a state school is more likely to have developed the intrinsic motivation required for university study while an independent school student is more likely to have relied on extrinsic motivation.
1) A-level results do correlate with degree performance but
2) There is a difference between state schools and fee-paying schools. I.e. a student with a specific set of A-levels will, on average, outperform a student with the same results in a fee-paying school.
Given that admissions should be about future potential, there was the logical argument a few years ago that universities should calibrate their offers according to the schooling of the candidate. IIRC, this was slaughtered in the press. It should be noted that our print media is dominated by people who both went to fee-paying schools themselves and send their own children to them. I suspect the clear bias in reporting is unconscious but it is absolutely real, in my view.
AFZ
But it does bring into question what you, as a society, want university to be for. Should it be for the “best” x%, or should it be for anyone who is capable of benefiting from it - will we function better as a society with a more educated populace ? For example, will people with training in data analysis and critical thinking to high level be less likely to be conned by propaganda or understand public health messages, or lead more fulfilled lives ? Or is it primarily about trying to match vocational skills to jobs ? Or something else ?
It was somewhat surprising as we live in Cambridge and he went to the top state sixth form college in the country. The council estate I live on has nothing in common with the one in Luton I was brought up on.
It's a feature, however it's arrived at. In my time at university, those from state schools tended to do the work unbidden, while those from private schools were much more used to being told what to do. Unsurprisingly, university lecturers (and post-graduates) are not the hand-holding variety.
And if many people can benefit from university, but some of the people only benefit a little bit, is investing in those people a better use of public funds than smaller class sizes in KS1, for example?
I suspect that our society has too firmly embedded both university-as-status-indicator and university-as-signalling that it's unable to have a real discussion about what education should look like, and whether our current university model is optimal either for the small fraction of the population that it served 50 years ago, or the expanded clientele that it serves now.
Are many undergraduates actually trained in "data analysis and critical thinking", for example? Does the ability to read and analyze Villon, or make puns in Latin help with that? Do you teach people to think, or just to look through the book until they find an equation with the right symbols in?
(Not pushing for an answer either way.)