Tuesday 24 June 2008

Degree Grades in 'Arbitrary' Shocker

There's an article on the BBC website here. Talk about shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. I particularly liked the line about the difficulty of having to shoehorn students of a multitude of differing abilities into the 2:1 and 2:2 spectrum, although they failed to mention that this occurs because we're not really allowed to award a 3rd or lower unless an essay is handed in at 15% of the wordcount, written in pidgin Mongolian, and addended with various besmirchments upon the character of the dean of humanities. As most British universities grade on a percentile basis, whilst only effectively employing the 50-75% range, wasn't this bound to happen at some point? I frequently find myself in the ludicrous situation of being able to put only 17 or 18 percentile-pointed marks between two essays when one of them is manifestly more than twice as good as the other. Could it be anything to do with the corporate-mindedness induced by tuition fees, by any chance?

More of this over the week, undoubtedly.

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