Mark Kent wrote:
> begin oe_protect.scr
> BearItAll <spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
>> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>>
>>> The Real Problem with Outsourcing
>>>
>>> ,----[ Quote ]
>>> | We may have been worrying about the wrong issues: America doesn't
>>> | need a flood of new engineers, it needs to keep research at home
>>> `----
>>>
>>>
>>
http://yahoo.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/nov2006/sb20061107_874214.htm
>>>
>>
>> Yers kin sand yer backie chewen son to 'arvard but yers cannae mek him
>> stoody.
>>
>> Goodness. Never realised how alike outback american and geordie are
>> before, can merge the two into one sentance and not choke on your tongue.
>>
>> Anyway, the shortages are genuine, partly because engineering is not as
>> kewl these days as it was, also because a Sigh-cology degree is still a
>> degree (get to wear a cape and have a party) but lots easier to get (who
>> on earth is going to fail a sigh-cology degree, if you can't bullshit
>> please do not do this corse) and it's quicker than an engineering or
>> English language degree too. Though you can take advanced bullshit if you
>> can't quite face looking for a job for a couple more years.
>
> My response is going to be controversial :-)
>
> The problem begins right back at school, here, and centres on two
> assumptions - deeply flawed:
>
> 1) We need more women in maths/science subjects (why?)
> 2) We need more graduates to compete with other countries (why?)
>
> In order to handle the first one, it was necessary to "restructure" our
> O-level and A-level systems such that males would no longer dominate
> the top 5-10%, as that was, typically, where you'd need to be do to
> maths/science degrees. After messing around in different ways, the
> final result is that we replaced exams with course work in many cases,
> and simply made it all much easier.
>
> I recall when the Telegraph published an O-level maths question from my
> year, which a few years later, had become an A-level question! This
> really happened - this is *not* made up, and shows how far the standard
> had fallen over 10 years ago. The standards have continued to plummet,
> as driven increasingly by No.2, above.
>
> In order to satisfy No.2, the government merged Polytechnics with
> Universities, mainly in order to start offering a huge range of "soft"
> degrees, such as "hotel management" (I'm /not/ kidding), and the like.
> These areas were previously very effectively served by Polys, using the
> HND/HDC system, which also provided an alternative route either to a
> CNAA degree, or to a University degree.
>
> However, this wasn't enough, so to make things /even easier/, the GCSEs
> and A-levels were taken away from academics who used to set and mark
> them, and they were replaced with a *company* (really) called EdExcel.
> This was because the academics, quite rightly, refused to stop applying
> a normal distribution in order to set grades, whereas the government
> wanted a nominal "bar height", so that more and more kids could get As
> in everything.
>
> Well, if you look at the marking distributions of O-level and A-levels
> from when they were actually set and marked by Academics (ie., back when
> they were hard), then you'd get a top 5-10% dominated by boys, the next
> 20-40% dominated by the girls, and the remainder dominated by the boys.
>
> By removing the bit where the boys were excelling, it's been possible
> for the government to create a situation where girls outperform boys all
> the time. Be aware also that girls tend to outperform boys in continuous
> assessment, /some/ boys would outperform the girls in exams.
>
> Presumably, the very broken political thinking was that if you had the
> girls doing better in maths and science at school, then they'd do
> degrees and so on. How stupid was that? All that's happened is that
> the boys who might've been motivated to go on to do maths and science
> can no longer shine in school, so they just don't do them. Science
> departments all over the country are shutting down. So, what was the
> question? Can you remember it? Probably not. Apparently, we needed
> more girls in maths and science. What did we get? Fewer mathematicians
> and scientists. I still don't really know what the original problem
> /was/.
>
> This disaster is on a scale so great it's hard to grasp just how bad
> this will be, but consider that we do not even have a new generation of
> maths and science teachers coming through to teach the present
> generation of kids. We're losing our capability completely in this
> area.
>
> But, the good news is that every year, more kids get higher grades at
> GCSE and A-level, and girls continue to outperform boys in everything.
>
>>
>> Then, those that do go through engineering have spent more years at uni
>> doing a much harder subject so have a bigger loan to pay off, those
>> weekend beer nights are essential under This much preasure, and anyway
>> after all that hard work they want a darn good wage. Whereas Indians are
>> happy with a bowl of rice and a couple of glass beads for their hair, as
>> it were.
>>
>> Personally, I hate the idea of students having to have loans at all. No
>> kid (and argue as much as you like, you are still kids) should leave
>> school, college or uni already in dept, it is all to the country's
>> benefit so the country should be paying for it, including their beer
>> nights.
>
> I fully agree with you, /but/ the government's problem is that it wanted
> easy degrees, so that it could have 40-50% of the population as
> "graduates", rather than the 5-10% we used to have. In order to do
> this, you either need to perform genetic manipulation to make everyone
> cleverer, /or/ you make the courses easier. Once you have 40-50% of
> your kids doing degrees, most of which are useless, someone has to pay
> for them. When it was just 5-10%, and graduates were pretty much
> guaranteed to get a better paid job, so over time, pay higher taxes, it
> worked. The whole model is now completely broken, and I'm not sure what
> it would take to fix it.
>
>>
>> But loans wont go away, so instead how about rewards. Each year you pass
>> you get a reduction on what is owed. i.e a portion is paid off the
>> previous years loan. The better the pass the more is paid off. With
>> grades for course types. Engineers getting all the way through getting up
>> to say 90% knocked off the loan, sigh-cology students get all the way
>> through and get say 2% knocked off. So the amount knocked off is directly
>> proportional to the amount of effort required to complete the course.
>>
>> Some day I might go to uni to do a english language corse. But at the
>> moment I just can't see how I'd benefit from it.
>>
>> PS: I would like to appologise to any sigh-cologists reading this. But I
>> find that I can't.
>>
>
> Perhaps, if there's a chance, I'll introduce you to my sister who
> lectures in Psy. at the University of Guelph :-)
>
You realise the irony? To a government department any degree is a degree,
many local councils are basically ran by sigh-cology degree holders, no
knowledge of anything and their get plum jobs. All the way up the pyramid
of government you have sigh-cologists, easy degree easy money no brain
cells required.
It is these sigh-cologists that come up with the brillient ideas you
mention, 'Hey man, lets make exams really easy then we'll have more people
who pass them!!! By the way what do you think of my new kewl teeshirt and
scarf?'.
|
|
