O Levels, degrees (and the alleged dumbing down of qualifications)

I wonder sometimes if there is a year planner in some central journalism powerhouse where the first day of sunshine marks the day where politicians, commentators, journalists and random bloggers start  'Students - Open Season'

It has been building for a few weeks now, with Michael Gove and his ever changing school curriculum and his uncanny knack of irritating the experts by pretending to be an expert. Today the first 'dumbed down degrees' shots were fired. 

A Times Higher Education (THE) article suggests that, in some colleges, too many students in some colleges, and not enough students in other colleges, are getting 'good' degrees. A visibly angry*  director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at the University of Buckingham  seethed* that "the results added “statistical clout to the widely held view that some universities award more firsts and upper seconds than is justified by their intakes"

But do the statistics actually tell us that? Or are they telling us that some colleges manage to get the best out of their students, regardless of the grades that those students bring to college with them. Maybe some colleges see the potential in their students and know how to nurture it. And perhaps some colleges assume that good A levels mean good students and think that the only work that the college needs to do is put information out there and these 'good students' will absorb it by some strange process of osmosis.

Statistical information gives us bare numbers, adjusted for individual characteristics and established norms. They will never tell us much about how human intervention makes or breaks an educational experience. 

I am remembering what O Level results day was like for me (*whispers* 35 years!!) I remember being reasonably impressed with my appalling performance: C in French and C in Irish. As some wit said at the time, I could've joined the French Foreign Legion to teach the Irish men their drill. That was the outcome of  an assumed level of 'intelligence' (I passed the 11+) and 5 years of a Catholic, grammar school education. My fabulous results could never have been predicted at the point of intake.

I did redeem myself a little (much) later. But I assume that my astounding O level grades and individual characteristics (lone parent, out of education for 20 years, woman) would have put me down as 'not very likely to achieve much more than a poor third but hey, we'll give her a shot for diversity's sake'. 

In the event, I graduated second in my class, coming a bit behind the mother of four who had returned to education after 20 odd years too.  The statistics probably couldn't have predicted us. We probably couldn't have managed it without one or two lecturers who were truly inspirational and our class mates who took us seriously. We probably benefited too from a modular system which allowed us to study subjects intensely over  shorter period. The 'traditional' system of end of year exams suit some but not everyone. We certainly gained some advantage from working in small, serious groups where we had the opportunity to discuss every detail of a topic to death. I don't know if this is relevant but we also benefited from being able to smoke our lungs out in the coffee bar, for hours at a time, while we dissected the complete work of David Trimble (perhaps the dullest (maybe only) book on NI housing law that was ever published).

Those students who, by implication, shouldn't have got their firsts because they didn't fit with the statistical characteristics of a 'person with a first' are not aberrations and their colleges are not 'dumbing down'. They are people that work hard, to a high standard and who have found their way of working, with the assistance of good teachers.

Every single child that I have ever met has out done my magnificent achievement at O Level - not because their exams or getting easier but because they work harder and are generally much cleverer. Most of those young people are either at university or have graduated. The vast majority of them have strings of GCSEs and degrees that would boggle a fragile mind.

They learn about things that women of a certain age, such as myself, have never even heard of. They have learned to ask questions, to be critical about things that were accepted as gospel by those of us who had the benefit of a Catholic education. They have learned to challenge assumptions about the world. They know about random stuff that baffles me. They've learned the language of technology which to all intents and purposes is a foreign language. What's more, they can use all the random things they have learned in the world that they inhabit. Learning and education is for them a practical and useful tool, not the abstract collection of information that plagued me.

As child number one starts the build up to her finals and child number two starts into his modular GCSEs, I am astounded that anyone could think that their efforts and achievements are somehow less credible than those of past generations or more exclusive establishments. 'Old' and 'classier' is not the same as 'better'- it is just old and exclusive, in all senses of those words.

Well done to all this years triers and achievers - you're all amazing.

(*ok - I made up the bit about 'visibly angry'. And 'seethed')

(First written 22nd August 2013 and amended 18th April 2014)