“I doubt there’s any other ‘advanced’ country which is as corona-insane as Britain.“
Is there any other country that has f*cked up the grade assignments for its state exams this year “because of corona”, for example?
As far as I am aware, there are NO other countries that allow most so-called “public” universities routinely to vary “entry offers” for undergraduate places according to what schoolteachers have told them about each candidate and what accent the candidates have spoken in at interview. In most countries, universities will publish the entry requirements for each degree course, and in a few cases they will say they will not accept more than the x students with the best marks, and that’s it. There is not even such a role as “admissions tutor”. And there are no interviews. Why should there be?
All the stuff about “socioeconomic” this and “socioeconomic” that in Britain is fake, a case of “I’m not lying to you” – or in this case, “Class? Oh we do our very VERY best to ENSURE that the son of a navvy gets EVERY ALLOWANCE MADE FOR HIM relative to the son of an investment banker. Access to knuckle-draggers is our ABSOLUTELY top priority.”
I don’t have current bureaucratic details to hand, but it used to be the case and very probably still is that whereas teacher-graded elements of GCSEs etc. could have their grades changed, it was considered completely unacceptable for them to have the RANKS changed – which says a great deal about what schools are all about. If a teacher said this student was a grade above that one, it was extremely difficult to get the board to admit that hey, the second student’s coursework when properly looked at and re-marked deserved a grade higher than the first student’s. As John Taylor Gatto rightly said, one of the fundamental functions of schools is “caste verification”.
Schoolteachers have been trying for YEARS to mark GCSEs and A Levels – not just coursework elements but every damned paper if they could manage it. Why? Because just occasionally a school student slips through their net. They HATE it when someone whose back they have put “C” on for years, and whom they have always “taught” accordingly, manages to get a B or an A, or, perish the thought, an A*. That’s like the world turning upside down for them.
Is there even any other country where teachers send “expected grades” to examination boards, let alone mostly without telling the students what grade they’re sending? What’s the point? There’s no decent point in it whatsoever, and the same goes for variable university “offers” for the same degree course, and also for universities interviewing students. There should be a required entrance bar and if you get over it, notify the university you’re registering for the course and then turn up on the first day of term. It’s like that most of the time in other countries.
The danger now is that once schoolteachers have got their filthy hooks into having a large role in determining what grades are assigned, the b*stards will resist like f*ck having that influence taken away from them.