I find Pestilence fascinating. It is pestilence in basically all popular depictions of the four horsemen (well, except Good Omens and even there pollution has replaced pestilence), to the extent it is almost pseudo-canonical. Yet it's relatively recent (according to the internet, it dates from 1906) and obviously has no basis in the original source. I think it's that pestilence just works much, much better as the fourth horsemen as an obvious major cause of disaster, whereas war and conquest are very similar.
The fig leaf for Pestilence is that pestilence (or plague) is one of the ways the Four Horsemen kill a quarter of the people on the earth (Rev 6v8). The others being sword, famine and wild beasts, the last of which seems under represented in the secondary literature.
I think the best understanding of the first two horsemen are wars of conquest and civil wars, which are similar, but with important differences.
(I actually still have a lot of your article to read, Susie took me to bed so I submitted the corrections I'd found so far.)
Yes, I read that, but it's clearly not the correct reading of the passage; it's not just wrong, but very obviously wrong. That being said, I'm totally here for anyone who wants to bite that bullet and present the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as Pestilence, War, Famine and Wild Beasts.
An outstanding contribution to this important issue.
"........one cannot have confidence that a 2:1 from an English university is a genuine mark of quality - or that every course is worth the £9,250 that students pay to attend."
Universities have too much independence and this has led to some institutions admitting too many students (to get more income) regardless of the ability of the student to succeed and complete the course, no matter how easy they make the standards.
The currency of too many UK degrees from too many universities in too many subjects and too many courses for too many students has been adulterated and diminished. They are crashing the value of UK degrees with the fake / counterfeit coinage of inferior qualifications that are of very limited value. This devaluation must be stopped to prevent people regarding the whole output of UK University degrees as worthless.
"As recently a decade ago" should be "As recently as a decade ago"
"more likely to upset when the establish and authorities" establish is probably meant to be establishment?
majorconcern -> major concern
In the sentence "these people are going to be hard to convince to fund universities more, and are going to support measures that either reduce funding, or otherwise crack down on what is seen as low value, or low quality, revision." Do you mean revision? If there was an argument in the previous paragraph that the marginal student isn't helped by university because they're just revising their A levels then I missed it.
I love your footnoting technology, because it makes it easy to access the gold in your footnotes. "For given values of well known", "As does Hull".
I was a QAA reviewer back in the day, and it was an awful process that ate up huge amounts of money, time and effort for very little return, with unis rapidly learning to game the system. I can't imagine that a uni OFSTED would be any better. It's prescriptions also contributed, I think, to the rise in grades, but not by improving teaching.
Yes - I agree QAA had very many flaws. I'm not sure what's replaced it has been better, mind you (even though I worked on that replacement!).
I think 'uni-Ofsted' is one of the worst outcomes. But if we wanted to keep uncontrolled numbers and undifferentiated funding (which I don't, but many do), I think you'll only get support for funding it properly with a much, much more rigorous quality regime. But that could bring a lot of unanticipated and negative side effects.
TEF, of course, has also been gamed. I am sure you are right about the quality regime, but I also think that any such regime will go the same way if it depends on metrics and generalized models. The external examiner regime is outdated, but the principle that subject specialists and experienced examiners are in the best position to comment on grades and procedures seems sound enough to me. That system would work better if examiners were not invited by the institutions they examine, but trained, paid and appointed by a central body with the power to follow up on issues raised.
On marks more generally, a part of the problem here is procedural: QAA encouraged using 'the full range of marks', which was something of a mantra for a while and has seen a great rise in the number of very high marks (which pull up averages). Grade boundaries, however, are usually survivors from a time when the maximum possible mark was barely above the first-class boundary of 70. There are other similar technical issues. In my experience, though (admittedly at a RG uni), quite a lot of the rise is simply down to fee-paying students believing that anything below a 2:1 is useless, and working their socks off accordingly (not always with positive consequences for their mental and physical health).
1) Speaking from my own discipline — Architecture — the expansion has been most damaging for the notionally 'elite' universities. When I started teaching in London, the sector had some small, highly prestigious institutions (UCL Bartlett, RCA etc) and a lot of large ex-poly courses. The former were very hard to get into, had low SSR and were intense. A decent degree from one was a strong signal of quality, and everyone on the courses was very ambitious and driven.
The latter were large, and had a bit of sink or swim ethic, at least in first year. Lots of people would fail or drop out. But the teaching was still good if you engaged with it, and graduates were generally very employable and often did well.
I've taught at a bunch of places across both groups. Since the cap on numbers was removed, all the prestigious places have got massive (2-4x larger cohorts). The academic culture and rigour has been diluted, and the quality is no longer in any way dependable. At the same time, most of the ex polys have shrunk away — in size, they're half as big or less. In neither case are you allowed to fail anyone any more because of league tables (and now B3 — thanks for that!) so you're nursing students through these courses who should have dropped out and done something else. Every metric creates its own monsters -- graduate unemployability reflects the fact that a lot of people who make it through should not have done.
2) TEF is a waste of time because the metrics are all the same ones the League tables use. So institutions are all already massively overfitted for producing these, regardless of the quality of the courses. They know how to game them. Everyone has their NSS maximisation strategy. Most of what you're measuring is how good they are at gaming.
The deficiencies of NSS as a measurement of teaching quality are obvious — to use an analogy, it's like a restaurant review by a person who's only ever been to one restaurant. No baseline. GOS mostly measures how good the university is at phone banking. It's all miles away from actual 'quality.' I've seen very poor courses with great NSS, and vice versa.
3) My suggestion for a quality measurement would be for the OfS to just sometimes show up and sit in at External Examination. Universities are meant to manage their own quality assurance. But the temptation is always for this to become friends doing favours for each other. No one is very incentivised to rock the boat. You wouldn't have to do this for very many courses — say one per institution per year, without prior notification. It would have a big effect.
LOL. Very funny to hear. Yes, I can imagine the uni admins think it's a known quantity.
I would tag on one more thing that occurs to me --
4) There is something off about the way that universities report cost per student. I have no special insight into how the figures are produced, but they are strongly at odds with observed provider behaviour. I think the mean value must be a bit padded.
Lots of low tariff institutions have been recruiting international students at £15-18k per year fee. The institutional rhetoric surrounding this is that it's an unbelievable cash cow. But it's barely off the top of the per-head cost profile.
Likewise: everyone is recruiting domestic students like there's no tomorrow. My former colleagues at RG uni are adding 50% to their first year cohort. You don't do this if it's impossible to make money on them. But this has happened sector wide — all the low tariff unis took at hit on domestic entrance in the summer because the prestige places took more in. These are not necessarily on 'cheap' courses either.
Obviously there are hypothetical business cases where these behaviours could make sense — but you wouldn't expect to see them institution-wide or sector-wide in the way that you do. Either the costs are wrong or something is producing irrational behaviour.
A (possibly dumb) anecdote. Next to my current (low tariff) employer is a secondary school. They teach 45ish weeks per year (vs our 24), five days a week (vs our 2.5). Including wraparound the hours can't be that different. The facilities (visible from the road) look similar to ours. Their workshop is open more than ours is! They do all this on, what, like £5.5k per pupil? We're all on the same pension scheme, but the secondary school teachers get paid more. QED.
I think the sentence "It is also the case that any given person ..." should be "It is also *not* the case ..."
"unlikely to be a massive fun of their student loan" -> "massive fan"
Love the bear facts. Extra marks for not trying to pretend that one of the of the biblical horsemen is pestilience.
Thanks - fixed!
I find Pestilence fascinating. It is pestilence in basically all popular depictions of the four horsemen (well, except Good Omens and even there pollution has replaced pestilence), to the extent it is almost pseudo-canonical. Yet it's relatively recent (according to the internet, it dates from 1906) and obviously has no basis in the original source. I think it's that pestilence just works much, much better as the fourth horsemen as an obvious major cause of disaster, whereas war and conquest are very similar.
The fig leaf for Pestilence is that pestilence (or plague) is one of the ways the Four Horsemen kill a quarter of the people on the earth (Rev 6v8). The others being sword, famine and wild beasts, the last of which seems under represented in the secondary literature.
I think the best understanding of the first two horsemen are wars of conquest and civil wars, which are similar, but with important differences.
(I actually still have a lot of your article to read, Susie took me to bed so I submitted the corrections I'd found so far.)
Yes, I read that, but it's clearly not the correct reading of the passage; it's not just wrong, but very obviously wrong. That being said, I'm totally here for anyone who wants to bite that bullet and present the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as Pestilence, War, Famine and Wild Beasts.
An outstanding contribution to this important issue.
"........one cannot have confidence that a 2:1 from an English university is a genuine mark of quality - or that every course is worth the £9,250 that students pay to attend."
Universities have too much independence and this has led to some institutions admitting too many students (to get more income) regardless of the ability of the student to succeed and complete the course, no matter how easy they make the standards.
The currency of too many UK degrees from too many universities in too many subjects and too many courses for too many students has been adulterated and diminished. They are crashing the value of UK degrees with the fake / counterfeit coinage of inferior qualifications that are of very limited value. This devaluation must be stopped to prevent people regarding the whole output of UK University degrees as worthless.
"As recently a decade ago" should be "As recently as a decade ago"
"more likely to upset when the establish and authorities" establish is probably meant to be establishment?
majorconcern -> major concern
In the sentence "these people are going to be hard to convince to fund universities more, and are going to support measures that either reduce funding, or otherwise crack down on what is seen as low value, or low quality, revision." Do you mean revision? If there was an argument in the previous paragraph that the marginal student isn't helped by university because they're just revising their A levels then I missed it.
I love your footnoting technology, because it makes it easy to access the gold in your footnotes. "For given values of well known", "As does Hull".
I was a QAA reviewer back in the day, and it was an awful process that ate up huge amounts of money, time and effort for very little return, with unis rapidly learning to game the system. I can't imagine that a uni OFSTED would be any better. It's prescriptions also contributed, I think, to the rise in grades, but not by improving teaching.
Yes - I agree QAA had very many flaws. I'm not sure what's replaced it has been better, mind you (even though I worked on that replacement!).
I think 'uni-Ofsted' is one of the worst outcomes. But if we wanted to keep uncontrolled numbers and undifferentiated funding (which I don't, but many do), I think you'll only get support for funding it properly with a much, much more rigorous quality regime. But that could bring a lot of unanticipated and negative side effects.
TEF, of course, has also been gamed. I am sure you are right about the quality regime, but I also think that any such regime will go the same way if it depends on metrics and generalized models. The external examiner regime is outdated, but the principle that subject specialists and experienced examiners are in the best position to comment on grades and procedures seems sound enough to me. That system would work better if examiners were not invited by the institutions they examine, but trained, paid and appointed by a central body with the power to follow up on issues raised.
On marks more generally, a part of the problem here is procedural: QAA encouraged using 'the full range of marks', which was something of a mantra for a while and has seen a great rise in the number of very high marks (which pull up averages). Grade boundaries, however, are usually survivors from a time when the maximum possible mark was barely above the first-class boundary of 70. There are other similar technical issues. In my experience, though (admittedly at a RG uni), quite a lot of the rise is simply down to fee-paying students believing that anything below a 2:1 is useless, and working their socks off accordingly (not always with positive consequences for their mental and physical health).
1) Speaking from my own discipline — Architecture — the expansion has been most damaging for the notionally 'elite' universities. When I started teaching in London, the sector had some small, highly prestigious institutions (UCL Bartlett, RCA etc) and a lot of large ex-poly courses. The former were very hard to get into, had low SSR and were intense. A decent degree from one was a strong signal of quality, and everyone on the courses was very ambitious and driven.
The latter were large, and had a bit of sink or swim ethic, at least in first year. Lots of people would fail or drop out. But the teaching was still good if you engaged with it, and graduates were generally very employable and often did well.
I've taught at a bunch of places across both groups. Since the cap on numbers was removed, all the prestigious places have got massive (2-4x larger cohorts). The academic culture and rigour has been diluted, and the quality is no longer in any way dependable. At the same time, most of the ex polys have shrunk away — in size, they're half as big or less. In neither case are you allowed to fail anyone any more because of league tables (and now B3 — thanks for that!) so you're nursing students through these courses who should have dropped out and done something else. Every metric creates its own monsters -- graduate unemployability reflects the fact that a lot of people who make it through should not have done.
2) TEF is a waste of time because the metrics are all the same ones the League tables use. So institutions are all already massively overfitted for producing these, regardless of the quality of the courses. They know how to game them. Everyone has their NSS maximisation strategy. Most of what you're measuring is how good they are at gaming.
The deficiencies of NSS as a measurement of teaching quality are obvious — to use an analogy, it's like a restaurant review by a person who's only ever been to one restaurant. No baseline. GOS mostly measures how good the university is at phone banking. It's all miles away from actual 'quality.' I've seen very poor courses with great NSS, and vice versa.
3) My suggestion for a quality measurement would be for the OfS to just sometimes show up and sit in at External Examination. Universities are meant to manage their own quality assurance. But the temptation is always for this to become friends doing favours for each other. No one is very incentivised to rock the boat. You wouldn't have to do this for very many courses — say one per institution per year, without prior notification. It would have a big effect.
Very interesting - thank you for sharing!
I tried to get NSS abolished when I was a SpAd but the OfS fought back hard, backed by the uni sector (their own worst enemy!) and so didn't succeed.
LOL. Very funny to hear. Yes, I can imagine the uni admins think it's a known quantity.
I would tag on one more thing that occurs to me --
4) There is something off about the way that universities report cost per student. I have no special insight into how the figures are produced, but they are strongly at odds with observed provider behaviour. I think the mean value must be a bit padded.
Lots of low tariff institutions have been recruiting international students at £15-18k per year fee. The institutional rhetoric surrounding this is that it's an unbelievable cash cow. But it's barely off the top of the per-head cost profile.
Likewise: everyone is recruiting domestic students like there's no tomorrow. My former colleagues at RG uni are adding 50% to their first year cohort. You don't do this if it's impossible to make money on them. But this has happened sector wide — all the low tariff unis took at hit on domestic entrance in the summer because the prestige places took more in. These are not necessarily on 'cheap' courses either.
Obviously there are hypothetical business cases where these behaviours could make sense — but you wouldn't expect to see them institution-wide or sector-wide in the way that you do. Either the costs are wrong or something is producing irrational behaviour.
A (possibly dumb) anecdote. Next to my current (low tariff) employer is a secondary school. They teach 45ish weeks per year (vs our 24), five days a week (vs our 2.5). Including wraparound the hours can't be that different. The facilities (visible from the road) look similar to ours. Their workshop is open more than ours is! They do all this on, what, like £5.5k per pupil? We're all on the same pension scheme, but the secondary school teachers get paid more. QED.
Thanks again for the essay — very interesting.