This is my attempt to make a meme.
Of course, there is a danger that it will be seen as insensitive. Tricky one. If anything I am having a go at ofqual. I do feel rather sad for students struggling with downgraded exam results this year. The whole situation is crazy.
I know there are plenty of people that say that they got poor results and did fine, and I know that a lot of companies would not worry about A-level grades when hiring someone, but it is a gateway to university. I vaguely remember my concern over results and whether it met the offers I got from universities. Wrong grades can ruin a promising carrier before it starts, especially in vocations like medicine. I really hope they fix this somehow.
As for making a meme - we will see. I did include a "deliberate mistake" so people can feel smug pointing it out - I think that is a feature that helps a meme happen. (well, one mistake, one that looks like a mistake but sort of isn't, so people can argue over it).
P.S. My keyboard broke, started constantly repeating keys - ones I went nowhere near with the screw driver. I think it is just getting it's own back at me.
But if you need to get grades yourself rather than plagiarising, cheating, or lying, you're not one of the people who *matter*, you're only a lesser sort. Sucks to be you but you're not even a Cabinet minister, you don't matter, we must keep the system stable.
ReplyDeleteAnd we can't possibly change our minds because that might suggest that the system we made up on the back of a napkin while drunk (operating on the assumption that only people like our friends, who got all-As by paying a lot of money, mattered) wasn't the best possible system ever.
(If this isn't actually what Williamson's reasoning is, he's doing a damn bad job of expressing himself.)
Relevant twitter thread: https://twitter.com/xtophercook/status/1293841154782441474
ReplyDeleteThe error rate Ofqual notes for their own algorithm is > 30% *at best*. This is *useless*.