__/ [ Mark Kent ] on Friday 21 July 2006 14:03 \__
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> Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
>> __/ [ Mark Kent ] on Thursday 20 July 2006 01:35 \__
>>
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>>> B Gruff <bbgruff@xxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
>>>> Appears so:-
>>>>
>>>> http://www.acq.osd.mil/actd/articles/OTDRoadmapFinal.pdf
>>>>
>>>> Clearly, the U.S. DoD is anti-capitalist, anti-American, full of
>>>> commies.... but it does seem to be in favour of OSS (and that's not the
>>>> Office of Strategic Service!)
>>>
>>> I wonder if the days of government excess are drawing to some kind of a
>>> close? There was a time when governments could throw shedloads of cash
>>> at projects and nobody would turn a hair, whereas now, there does seem
>>> to be a lot more interest in the details of what's going on. That said,
>>> the US budget deficit is the stuff of legend.
>>
>> Throwing money at Microsoft is like employing your own son
>> though. It makes such news more encouraging than, let us
>> say, the French moving to Open Source. On the issue of
>> budgets, it is rather sad that funds for research is
>> declining in the States. Education is affected in line with
>> this trend, which leads to a dangerous cycle wherein
>> youngsters become less literate and less able to compete
>> with the tech world. Then you have the debates about A levels
>> and GCSE's, which were argued to get easier just because st-
>> udents are doing better...
>
> That's not quite the issue. Where it went wrong with GCSE and A-level
> is that the traditional system imposed a distribution on results, such
> that a fixed proportion of people would get an A,B,C,D,E,F grade each
> year, so the system was naturally consistent. You knew that if you
> interviewed people with three As, then they'd come at the top of their
> group/year/cohort.
>
> The new system attempts to set an arbitrary line, and attempts to
> determine who has gone beyond it, and who has not. It's a bit like
> giving every 100 metre sprinter who beats 10 seconds a gold medal,
> rather than giving gold to whoever comes first, silver to whoever comes
> second, and bronze to third. It got so bad that in the end, the
> government had to invent a new grade, the "nursery" A* grade.
*Aha*! I carry on learning new things in COLA. So I guess the grading suffers
from the same issue that psychometric exams such as the SAT's resolve by
scaling the results and ensuring a flat distribution of scores.
I didn't take part of the school-level educational system in the UK, as you
can probably tell...
> From an employment perspective, I'm interested in how candidates have
> performed against their peers, because I'd like to pick the best of this
> year's crop, as it were. The present system is such that most of the
> people I now interview are not remotely capable of doing what I'm
> looking for, at least those from the UK, and we employ more and more
> people from abroad.
>
> This is a crime, it's a letting down whole generations of students who
> have no way of proving their level of competence against their peers,
> and employers do not have the time or the resources to do it for them.
Interesting. I can think of scenarios where tests truly had this issues.
Returning to aptitude and psychometric tests as an example, practice
improves people scores. So does it truly gauge intelligence? Or skills? Or
is it too easy to /adapt/ -- through practice -- to the requires skills set?
Many say that education measure people's willingness to learn rather than
innate potential...
> The perpetrators of this crime are the governments who wish to claim
> they're improving education, because they can genuinely show that more
> students were getting As than before. If you've no comprehension of
> stats, then that's probably convincing. For the rest of us, it's just
> manipulation of people's lives.
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