tim's experiment

Two fallacies have been widely propagated about the new Diploma of Secondary Education. The first one is easily disposed of. This is the claim that the new Liberal Studies subject can be considered a success because most students managed to pass it. Now it is true that the whole enterprise would have been a disaster if students had failed the exam in large quantities. After all, many universities require it. But avoiding disaster hardly counts as success. Saying that most people pass the exam is like saying a boat floats. It’s a good start, and better than the alternative, but more is needed before we start congratulating ourselves. Among the possible explanations for the encouraging pass rate is that the exam was rather easy or was graded with a generous eye. The purpose of a new subject is not to provide another exam which students can pass. I am not sure exactly what the purpose of Liberal Studies is, but it will be a year or two before we even have an inkling of whether it has made any difference. Will next year’s university students perhaps be more liberally studious than their predecessors? What do you think?

The other error was more grandiose. This was committed by those reporters who totted up the number of people who had achieved the minimum number of passes required for university admission, and noted that the number of university places available was considerably smaller. This was written up on the basis that large numbers of people had “qualified for” university but would be deprived of the benefit for which they had qualified because of the shortage of places. This is placing far too much faith in universities’ ability to encapsulate their various requirements into a set of examination grades. The minimum requirements for admission are just a bureaucratic convenience, a way of reducing the potential pool of candidates to manageable proportions. Many programmes will actually have higher requirements, or more detailed ones, than the minimum. Popular programmes will use exam results to shrink their own pool of applicants, so that the practical minimum for the course you want may be much higher than the minimum standard agreed for all universities. The minimum is set so that even the least fashionable institutions will have a pool of eager applicants. It tells us nothing about the people who reach it, or don’t reach it.

Nobody who has thought seriously about the matter supposes that every student without exception who reaches the minimum standard would enjoy, benefit from, or even successfully complete, a university education. The converse is also true. Some students who fail to reach the minimum standard are in fact perfectly capable of university studies and now the system is a bit more flexible many of them get the chance to prove it. One of my most outstanding students had failed all her A Levels but gained entry to a HND course with her AS language scores. She transferred to HKBU on the strength of her excellent performance in the Higher Diploma and did very well.  Examinations are a very rough and ready way of measuring people.

Personally I wonder if it might be better if fewer people went to university. I notice they are now getting complaints in America – where more than half the population goes to university – that there is a serious shortage of people with technical and engineering qualifications. Mass higher education means lots of people having general education degrees which do not prepare them for demanding jobs. In the light of this it could be considered rather ominous that the arrival of 3-3-4 education in Hong Kong has been accompanied by a wave of enthusiasm in local universities for … general education. Ever since the government decided to go from having three universities to eight the newly elevated institutions have been shedding practical professional subjects in favour of more theoretical and academic ones. My university has decided to drop Physics. Too difficult to get good students. We’re still doing Sociology…