Resulting from Results

We're into the middle of August now, and that means that A-Level students have, after what must seem an age for them, got their results, and the GCSE students are about to get theirs.  On the apparent up side, the pass rate has risen to 97.8%, 8.2% of which was at the top grade of A*, but on the down side over 190 thousand people  had to go through clearance to try and get one of 40 thousand university places, and an expected 200 thousand people who wanted to go to university missing out.  But are these really the high and lowlights to come from results day?

It is said so often now that it has become cliché that exams are too easy, and a figure of almost 98% passing seems to be damning evidence for this argument.  However I do not believe this to be the case.  I think that people are no longer being taught the subject, but being taught to pass an exam.  With exams tending to ask similar questions year on year, and the restriction of the syllabus for some subjects aiding this it is possible to get an A in some A Levels by going through mark schemes and looking for the points that they reward, and then learning them.  I know this works, I did it for one of my modules a few years ago and got over 90% in it.  It demeans the qualification that many 17 and 18 year olds put a lot of effort in gaining.

I also think having such high rates are devaluing the qualification.  Unfortunately, with teachers living by their percentages they will do what they can to keep it as high as possible, which bring me back to being taught to pass the exam.  It may look great that they have so many A grades, but the actual amount they know may not bare sufficient resemblance to what an A grade student should know.  This results in universities struggling to differentiate between them - the amount of places that require 3As or higher is significantly less than the amount of students gaining them - over a quarter of all A-Level grades are A/A* this year.  We need more people failing, and fewer people gaining the top grades.  In general everyone will experience some kind of failure in life, but without having any experience of having done so at school they may not react positively and that is a vital life skill.  So overall, I think having the highest pass rates and % of A/A* ever is in fact not a good thing, but a bad one.

I also think that the huge amounts of people wanting to go to University is bad, so the 200,00 missing out is a good thing.  Understandable, but bad.  The reason I think it is understandable is that with the increase in the cost of going to University set to rise, the amount of people who would take a year out, or aren't sure are applying now otherwise the cost would be incredible.  However too many people are going to Universities simply to have a student experience.  This has become the overriding reason, whereas it should be that people go to University because they are interested in their subject and want to study it for 3 years.  This attitude is a pet hate of mine, and I would dearly love to see UCAS interview everyone who applies through them to decide what their motive for a degree is, and for people who only want to go get drunk to not get through.  However, such a system would be far too expensive and probably not work anyway.  There are also too many Universities now, giving a huge surplus in graduates seeking employment.  This results in jobs demanding a degree when it isn't always applicable to them.  Not every qualification needs to be a degree, or needs to be a university course - I also think the old polytechnics should go back to that status too.  As much as I want the population to be educated, university education isn't for everyone, and too many people don't realise it.

I know that my thoughts are probably against what most people believe, but in order to make the qualifications more meaningful I think they are necessary

Holidays for Science

I am an atheist.  I never pretend to be christian, yet every December I buy and receive Christmas presents, and every spring I do the same with Easter Eggs.  Yet I don't believe in them.  I do believe in science, but I've never celebrated any historic event from science in a similar way.  The 2001 census had approxiately 15% of the people who answered that question claim to believe in no religion, and almost 8% of people refused to answer it.  And while this is my opinion and not fact, I believe that there are people who never go to church, don't believe in any god, but put themselves down as Christian due to being raised in that religion.  Atheists are a growing population, but as a Christian country, we still celebrate these two holidays as a nation, even if we don't believe in them.  Darwin's Birthday I saw mentioned a few times last year, but this was the first time for it.  Any event worthy of celebration is only celebrated on memorable anniversaries of them, not annually.  And while the birth and death of Christ are clear events to celebrate, there isn't a birth of science, and neither has it died.  This leads to the question which should we celebrate?

There are too many contenders to celebrate them all.  A few initial thoughts give rise to the following :

1. DNA discovered
2. The structure of the atom being described
3. Achieving Cloning
4. Artificial life being created
5. The laws of Thermodynamics
6. Maxwell's Equations
7. Newton's Laws of Motion
8. Einsteinium Relativity
9. The Start of Quatum Mechanics
10. Darwin's theory of Evolution

Admittedly, having studied physics, I am highly biassed in including some of these, but I believe that without them our understanding of the world, and the technology that we would find ourselves using would be incredibly different to how it is now.  We would be without so many things we have found ourselves relying on, yet we don't celebrate them ahead of the birth of someone over 2000 years ago on a date different to that he was actually born on.  This seems to me to be crazy.  But if we split this group into two, Physical and Biological seem to be a natural split, we could replace Christmas and Easter with holidays that atheists actually believe in.  I realise that there are countless things I missed here -  I didn't even mention Penicillin and all the medical advances we've made, feel free to suggest any worthy of major celebration in our new atheist calender which will take over from the Christian one.  And just as the Christians annexed Pagan festivels to make the transition easier, I suggest Biology Day, being about new life, should be in the spring, leaving Physics Day to be Mid-Winter.  Surely it is only a matter of time before religious calenders become out dated, and with people still wanting holidays to celebrate, I think this is the future.