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Posts Tagged ‘education’

Education and Chat GPT: time for a return to the bad old days?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on October 26, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Happily I retired from the university teaching scene before Chat GPT and his mates came along, because it has apparently made life rather difficult.

Generally the most subtle assessment method, at least in the humanities, is the essay. You set the topic, send the student away, and assess the resulting masterpiece a week later.

People in other necks of the woods have other choices, of course. Mathematicians can be asked to tackle a problem on the spot. Subjects which consist primarily of absorbing a lot of memorable material can be tested with multiple-choice questions, which have the additional advantage that they can be graded by a computer.

The most picturesque assessment method was applied to trainee aircraft engineers. The class assembled at 9 am and each member was presented with a small engine. At 1 pm the examiner returned, by which time the engine had to be dismantled entirely into its component parts. The class then had lunch, then reassembled to reassemble their engines.

At 5 pm the examiner returned and tried to start each engine. If it started first time you had passed, and if not…

But I digress. The problem with setting essays now is that you do not know if the result was partly, or indeed wholly, written by artificial intelligence. This has in turn produced a lot of interest in detection, which is sometimes possible. The person who told me about this problem recalled a case in which the essay included the word “albeit”.

This is not the sort of word which comes up often in sociable chat so the writer was asked what it meant… and could not answer.

Clearly though there is going to be an ongoing arms race here between AI users and programmers, trying to produce ever more convincing forgeries, and teachers and other detectives looking for ways to spot traces of computer composition.

The answer, I fear, is going to be a return to the primitive practices of the past.

When I took my first degree, half a century ago, there was no continuous assessment, multiple choice was regarded as simplistic, and computers were monstrous machines which had to be fed punched cards.

We wrote essays at least once a week and these had to be submitted and discussed, but they were not part of the assessment. There was also a small examination each term intended to reassure your personal academic adviser that you were still alive and working, but this was not part of the assessment either.

After three years of this regime you encountered an ordeal more like the old Chinese civil service exam (in which candidates were locked up for a week and, according to legend, invited to write down everything they knew) than modern gentle testing methods.

Starting on Wednesday we had three-hour exams each morning and afternoon until Sunday, when you had a day off, a relic of the days when universities were mainly intended to train clergymen. The ordeal resumed on Monday and ended at lunchtime on Tuesday, at which point there was an understandable tendency for the survivors to get resoundingly drunk.

The actual examination was quite Spartan. You were allowed (times had changed) to use a Biro. The paper was white and completely blank. People were agitating for lined paper, to help authors whose writing tended to diverge gradually from the horizontal as they got down the page. This came eventually, but too late to help me.

There was a list of about a dozen questions, of which in your three hours you were expected to attempt four. As the marks available were divided equally between your four answers it was an elementary point of exam technique to get to four somehow.

There were no “open books”, bringing in notes of any kind was cheating, and the examiners were not – with rare exceptions – the people who had taught you. We were not asked our opinions of the teachers, but because the examiners were applying consistent standards, the outcomes of individuals and groups could be compared.

This was a stressful system and I would not recommend copying it in all its details. It favoured glib bullshitters and people who could write quickly. It was a great preparation for journalism, which is perhaps not a recommendation.

But as AI tramples its way across the academic landscape it may be time to rediscover the merits of putting the students in a room with paper, pen, questions and a time limit. At least you know who has written what.

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An economist on education: if it don’t make you rich it’s a waste of time

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on July 17, 2025| 1 Comment »

The newspapers are full, as is customary at this time of the year, of stories about local kids who have done well in the school-leaving exams. It seems that most of the stars of this show want to become doctors, which shows a touching faith in the inability of AI to take over the routine parts of medicine.

For a discordant note readers could turn to The Economist, which printed a long piece lamenting the fact that, as a subsidiary headline put it, “the bottom has fallen out of the graduate job market”.

The primary evidence for this comes from America, where graduates in their 20s have been found in one study to have higher unemployment rates than the general population. Things are apparently moving in a similar direction, but much more slowly, outside America.

Graduates – again from the evidence we are back in the USA – find jobs harder to come by and also less satisfying than they used to. Very good international example from the BBC on Thursday: mainlander with degree from Oxford and PhD from Singapore university is working … as a food delivery driver.

The Economist’s writer dismisses as an unsatisfactory explanation claims that many graduates of American universities are ill-educated and in some cases actually illiterate. These stories may be true, but the brightest and best are also finding employment elusive.

Some formerly entry-level jobs are certainly falling to AI. A more original suggestion is that people used to go to university to achieve digital literacy; now everyone gets it from their smart phone so for many button-pushing jobs a degree looks unnecessary.

The writer concludes that many American students are now deciding that university is not worth it: the time… the debt … the disappointment. This is not happening in Europe where, as our scribe puts it, “”Governments are subsidising useless degrees, encouraging kids to waste time studying.”

What do we mean by “useless degrees”? “Outside America, the share in arts, humanities and social sciences mostly grows. So, inexplicably, does enrolment in journalism courses. If these trends reveal young people’s ideas about the future of work, they truly are in trouble.”

Really? Underlying this lament appears to be the unspoken assumption that the main or only reason for any form of study is to increase your future income. Education of any other kind amounts to “encouraging kids to waste time.”

I am reminded of Oscar Wilde’s lament that people “know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” This might usefully be adapted. Economists – and The Economist – know the price of everything and erroneously suppose that the value is the same thing.

“Until recently,” says our author, “the obvious path for a British student hoping to make money was a graduate scheme at a bank.” But making money is only one of the things people hope to find in a job. Some British students would rather shovel sewage for a living than work in a bank and I was once one of them.

Only a Philistine society will limit its educational offerings to subjects with an immediate practical application, or indeed an ironclad promise of future wealth attached to them.

Indeed there are some areas of human activity where the attainment of the highest standards requires that many are tested, most of whom will fail. Training for air traffic controllers is a notorious example. Thousands apply, hundreds are accepted, tens actually complete the course and get into a control tower, some of whom drop out later when they find the work too stressful.

Many of the more demanding military specialities have similar attrition rates. In university programmes this is obscured by the fact that every student who makes a reasonable amount of effort will get the degree. But in general music grads do not become musicians, Eng Lit grads do not become novelists, philosophy grads do not become professional philosophers and the only graduate archaeologist I ever met was teaching in a primary school.

This brings us to the “inexplicable” attraction of journalism courses, which I flogged happily and successfully for nearly three decades. It was a platitude among teachers of journalism that most of our students were not going to be journalists, or if they became journalists would not stay that way.

At one time there was a spirited debate in the journalism education business about whether we should continue to design courses on the basis that the graduate would be able to meet the requirements of the trade (art, craft, science, con trick or disease, whichever you prefer) or we should accept that we were teaching non-journalists and adapt courses accordingly.

Generally we concluded that the practical aspects of a journalism programme were one of the things which students liked, even if they were not going to be practitioners themselves. Most of my students never became journalists. A surprising number (at least to me) became police people. Journalism may be (as Max Hastings puts it) a pursuit for “cads and bounders”, but it still has a whiff of adventure around it that you are not going to get in the Business School. But if you really want to be rich … your choice.

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Where are we going to put these overseas students? Not in Shenzhen, please

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on June 28, 2025| 3 Comments »

Some time ago I noted that banks continued to prune branches while the local education industry continued to spawn new universities, and if these trends continued it would eventually be easier to find a university here than an outlet of the bank whose branches used to be proverbially “as common as rice shops”.

We’re not there yet, but we’re close. HSBC is now down to 20 branches while the number of universities has officially risen to 12. This does not include the mysterious University of the Built Environment, which announced its promotion in the Standard recently, but apparently is domiciled in the UK. There are eight recognised post-secondary colleges waiting in the wings. So lots of choices.

Unfortunately this expansion of opportunity has coincided with a drastic drop in the proportion of the population in the late teens and early 20s, whether in the workforce or the general population. Why this has happened – the trend seems to have picked up after 2019 – I leave to your imagination.

Meanwhile, in a possibly unrelated development, the government has increased the proportion of students which the universities it funds can take from outside the territory. The upper limit has now reached 40 per cent. Many of these people are paying through the nose. This is what economists count as an invisible export of services.

So it is a Good Thing. But like all Good Things it comes with costs and one of these has now surfaced. Hong Kong students traditionally solved their accommodation problems by living at home. This is the system still followed in Scotland, though not in England, where leaving home to go to Uni is an important life landmark, albeit an increasingly expensive one.

The usual Hong Kong arrangement when I started teaching was that the parents provided room and board, while the student worked part time to raise fees and spending money. The more well-off universities had “halls of residence” which made no attempt to fit in the entire population, but aimed to provide a taste of communal life for those who wanted it.

We now have the prospect of a severe shortage of accommodation for students from outside Hong Kong. This has not gone unnoticed and last week the permanent secretary (the senior real civil servant, not the DAB apparatchik) in the Development Bureau announced a pilot scheme. The government will relax some planning requirements and procedures for property owners who wish to convert into student housing their hotel or office block.

The secretary, Doris Ho Pui-ling, noted – perhaps tactlessly – disappointing demand from tourists, and high vacancy rates in some commercial offices. Ms Ho said that action on this matter was necessary to support the “Study in Hong Kong” brand and the government had set a quota, as governments do.

Whether it will be met remains to be seen. Real estate people were doubtful, citing conversion costs of $1,500 to $2,000 a square foot, as making it difficult to devise profitable schemes.

The Standard (which has dropped the Mary Ma masquerade and now calls its editorial an editorial, as a respectable newspaper should) opined that student needs should not be met at the expense of tourism; the territory’s hotels were 80-90 per cent full, and the number of overseas tourists was rising.

Well I agree with Ms Ho. If the government wants to have lots of students from other places it needs to provide somewhere for them to live. From my time as a bit of student representative grit in the smooth machinery of university management a few observations.

Conversions of factories and offices are really difficult. They usually feature large floor spaces. The bosses take the spaces round the outside with windows and the peasants work in a big open space in the middle which has no natural light or ventilation. Short of digging a big hole in the middle of the building to provide a light well, or a change in student expectations – do you really need a window? – the floor plan is a problem.

Hotels do not have this issue. Actually many UK universities are happy to let out empty student rooms to budget tourists in the summer. It’s a good deal. The room is simple but you also get the use of a kitchen and a laundry, a boon for travellers on the cheap. I would have thought a basic hotel could be switched to student use with little change.

The price of conversion should not be regarded as fixed. In my experience architects can be quite creative if told firmly enough that their first draft is unaffordable.

There will usually be opposition. I find this a bit surprising but some people think student residences will bring noise and disorder, or depress nearby property prices. No doubt the Standard will not be the only defender of the tourism industry’s interests.

I hope, though, to hear no more of the Standard’s suggestion that students who are studying at Hong Kong universities should live in Shenzhen. It is a curious fact of life that students, who cheerfully waste their time in interesting ways, will not tolerate a long commute.

When the University of Lancaster was planned it was assumed that students would live in nearby Morecambe, a moribund seaside resort with lots of cheap holiday accommodation. This did not happen. Students hated the idea. Readers who have had the misfortune of visiting Morecambe in the winter may find this unsurprising, but it held in other places also.

The “Study in Hong Kong” brand will not long survive the discovery that your student is regarded as a sort of reverse vampire, welcome in Hong Kong only in the hours of daylight.

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School inspections: is it ‘How can I help?’ or ‘Impress me or die”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on June 29, 2024| 1 Comment »

School inspections are a funny business. They sit on an obstinate paradox which makes it difficult to have confidence in the results.

An experienced observer can glean quite a lot about a school from walking the corridors: are the students cheerful and well-behaved; what is on the walls? Our observer can gather more from looking at documents: are the teachers planning and conferring, do they attend development courses, are they well qualified for what they are doing? But really if you want to evaluate what is going on you need to visit the place where education actually happens: the classroom.

This is where we trip over the paradox. The classroom is usually populated by the class and the teacher. Add an inspector and you are no longer looking at a normal lesson. The teacher usually knows the inspection is coming and can be tempted to put on a bit of a show.

Less obviously the class may respond to the presence of a stranger. When I did my teaching practice (a long time ago) my classes were fairly riotous. It was an all-boys school, and all the boys knew I was the lowest form of teaching life, and would be leaving after one term anyway. But by a kind convention, during the assessment visits from my tutor everyone behaved impeccably. Teaching briefly became easy.

The important variable in an inspection is the attitude of the inspector, which can range from “How can I help?” to “Impress me or die!” The gentle end of the spectrum can be found in the autobiographical works of Gervase Phinn, who was an inspector in the more photogenic parts of Yorkshire. The harsh end of the scale led to the tragic case of Ruth Perry, a primary school head who killed herself after being told that an inspection would lead to the school being downgraded from “outstanding” to “inadequate”.

Local inspections have generally languished in obscurity until last week, when the Education Department started publishing fairly detailed reports on individual schools. These demonstrated an impressive level of patriotic enthusiasm. Schools were rated on how far they had integrated national security into the curriculum, and whether they had introduced the required national education subjects.

The inspectors also, rather bizarrely, gave their verdicts on the quality of the flag raising ceremonial and the singing of the national anthem. Some schools were chided because the singing was not loud enough.

Public ire ensued, mainly because so many of these criticisms were levelled at two schools catering for “special needs”, the currently acceptable euphemism for children mentally or physically ill-adapted for conventional school life. Many observers, including me, thought that teachers in this demanding field probably had more urgent things to worry about than staging routine patriotic performances.

Special needs teaching is much more difficult than the conventional stuff and demands extraordinary patience, sympathy and persistence. It is one of life’s major injustices that money and prestigious titles (Professor Hamlett to you, Sunshine!) are showered on those who teach a carefully selected audience of consenting adults, while the saintly qualities required of special needs teaching go unheralded and unrewarded.

Having been loudly scolded on-line the Education Bureau subtly shifted its position. If children could not learn about the Basic Law and other constitutional matters they could at least be taught to sing the national anthem.

The bureau said “March of the Volunteers” had “a distinctive rhythm, a high-pitched melody, majestic force and embodies the courage and indomitable fighting spirit of the Chinese nation. Schools have a responsibility to let students understand the etiquette and attitude required when performing the national anthem, so as to cultivate students’ national identity and respect for the country.”

This really does not address the basic question, which is whether teaching primary school kids to sing this particular tune “loudly” is a good use of educational time. After all the anthem was intended as a film score, not a school tune. The rhythm is difficult, the range wide, and there is much variation in both.

The British national anthem (God save the King … or Queen as the case may be) provides an illustrative contrast. It is a plodding, simple tune. It can be played on anything from a kazoo to the Mighty Wurlitzer and everyone who has been required to play it recognises that it is terminally boring. The March of the Volunteers is more exciting, more interesting and more demanding. Some professional musicians have had trouble with it.

I imagine few schools have a band capable of providing the backing so what is proposed is a sort of communal karaoke with a sound track. Students who have not been attending, or not been attending to, lessons in Putonghua will also find they are effectively required to sing in a foreign language.

Under the circumstances complaints about the volume of the singing seem ill-advised. Different halls have different acoustics. Primary school kids are not opera singers and a common reaction to uncertainty about the tune or the words is to drop the volume. As we cannot switch to an easier song we will probably have to put up with this.

Anyway students will survive a few extra singing lessons. Whether the March of the Volunteers can stand this sort of treatment is another matter. Somewhere around the 30th repetition it will cease to embody the “courage and indomitable fighting spirit of the Chinese nation” and come to embody only the Education Department’s enthusiasm for repetitive and boring patriotic performances … by other people. Do you think school inspectors start the week by singing the national anthem together?

No, I don’t think so either.

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University challenges 2

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on March 3, 2013| Leave a Comment »

The intriguing thing about government announcements is sometimes what is not said, not what is. Consider the bit in the budget speech about a new scheme to provide scholarships which will enable young Hongkongers to attend overseas universities. The part of the speech goes like this: “I propose to inject an additional $480 million into the HKSAR Government Scholarship Fund (GSF) to set up scholarships for outstanding local students to take degree courses or teacher training programmes in prestigious overseas universities. I expect that about 20 scholarships will be awarded each year. Students who receive the awards must undertake to teach in Hong Kong upon graduation for at least two years or a period equivalent to the duration of receiving the scholarships.”

Charitable observers may see here an attempt, however clumsy, to upgrade the standards of the local teaching profession. Not a very good attempt, actually. The scholarships are not to be means-trested, apparently, so most of their recipients will be people who would have gone to a university somewhere anyway. The advantages of prestigious overseas universities are much exaggerated. I say this having attended one myself.

But it seems this proposal has an interesting history. According to Regina Ip (column in the Post on Sunday) the original proposal was that the scheme would, at a cost of $1.5 billion, finance 25 post-grad scholarships and 50 undergrad ones. Students would be required to pursue “world-class programmes at top universities” and the aim had nothing to do with teaching. The political party which put forward the idea — Ms Ip did not say which one — apparently hoped to produce a pool of world-class talent who would be the future leaders of Hong Kong. This implausible project did not impress the Education Bureau. This may be due to bureaucratic conservatism. It may be due to familiarity with the research in these matters, which suggests that the benefits of “world-class programmes at top universities” are grossly overstated. Anyway the project was pruned vigorously, and what was left is now focussed on teaching.

According to Ms Ip officials now say that priority will be given to students of English or pre-school education. Abandoning her touching faith in the magical properties of top universities she says that this makes no sense. An English degree from such a place is unnecessary and pursuers of other subjects – presumably in other places – may make better teachers of English. More questionably she says that universities do not teach education at undergraduate level. Well some of them do and some of them don’t. The “prestigious” ones can barely bring themselves to teach it at all. A point she might also have made is that none of the “top universities” teach early childhood education.

Actually there is a problem with universities and education. The people who teach in universities and run them have generally had no training in education as such at all. As a result the technical standards of university teaching are abysmal. But university teachers do not know this. They think (as most of us do on most topics) that they are at least above average, and since this has been achieved with a minimum of preparation and training, then teaching must be easy. The people who teach it, moreover, are concerned with practical matters with have low prestige in university contexts. Theory is much more interesting. So in many universities education is a neglected and scorned area, starved of funds, prestige and proficient students.

This is a pity. One of the things which shines out of international comparisons of education systems is that in places where the system works the teaching profession is highly regarded and attracts able recruits. This is something worth imitating.  How curious, then, that the government still refuses to take a step which would cost nothing and raise the status of the profession overnight. The Institute of Education should be a university. It isn’t. Rectifying this would do much more for local teaching than sending a few rich kids overseas at the taxpayer’s expense. And cost a lot less.

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