Cable Forum - View Single Post

**Hugh** · 13-08-2020, 10:19

Coronavirus related, as it’s the pandemic that’s causing the issue with Uni Admissions.

A colleague of my daughter (who works in University admissions) wrote this post, and I found it informative and relatively balanced.

Quote:

I feel for the A Level students, I really do. I have a nephew, Xxx, and a niece, Xxxxxxx, having to suffer this issue with all of their friends, and I also get to see the university side with a government flip-flopping at all the wrong times just to look as though they're listening, but actually making things even more complicated and not necessarily better for the students.

Now, you might think this triple lock business is a win-win for the A Level students hoping to get to their chosen university, but it's not from where I sit.

Take the student point of view. They want to get to the "best" university (whether that's for academic, social, family or whatever combination of factors) for them. That means they have to know they have the best possible grades, but that's in competition with the other students; so if everyone gets a better grade they're no better off...and if it's not even (let's say we have conservative teachers at school A and optimistic students at school B), it's possible to actually be worse off. Just changing the guess-work from the exam board to the teachers doesn't make it necessarily fairer. Nor does the third option (moving it to be an actual exam) as that defers the decision until later, at least delaying application but also potentially pushing the student into having to compete with a bloated cohort of next year's Year 13s plus those who held on.

Then take the university point of view. For those not involved, some of the nuances might not be obvious. What happens at this time of year is that the universities get early sight of the grades (normally - as this year - this is on the Friday before the students get their results) so that they can prepare for both confirming places for those who achieved the offer, agreeing a strategy for those who may have missed (accepting lower grades in some cases, rejecting the application in others) and knowing how to deal with "Clearing". Normally, this means that some very hard work through the weekend means that by the Tuesday, you know (roughly) how many definite students you will have on your books, and how many you might need to pick up through the clearing process.

What you're not expecting is that on Wednesday morning, the government makes an announcement that the grades you've been modelling your acceptance/rejection decisions on are now less than agreed!

In fact, you may have been expecting to accept (say) 5000 students and reject 2000 which, with a target recruitment of 6000, leaves 1000 students to pick up through clearing. (These are not real numbers, and I've deliberately not chosen ones close to where I work). As of this morning, any one of the 2000 students might have suddenly picked up an extra 8 points and now be a firm acceptance - but you don't know that because you don't have the unfiltered results, so you now don't know whether you have 5000 or 7000 or somewhere in-between. That means you don't know whether you go into clearing or not, and if you do, what is your target.

The problem with that is that you can't over-recruit or under-recruit without a financial penalty, and the lack of certainty means hitting the "right" number is even harder than usual. There is a penalty (financial) for taking on more students than you have been allocated. This is not always enforced, but my understanding is that this year it's been indicated that it will be rigorously enforced to ensure that larger universities don't over-recruit to offset any losses due to the expected loss of overseas income. That means you either have a conservative approach to clearing and run the risk that extra students don't come through and you have a shortfall in students numbers to add to any overseas income losses. Bear in mind, this isn't a one-off loss; while students transfer sometimes, most don't so losing a student one year means a reduced income for the three to four years of the degree programme. The alternative is to be more positive in recruiting through clearing, and overshoot...at which point you end up with too many students creating both a funding headache (because of financial penalties) and a logistical nightmare as you try to deal with oversized cohorts which don't fit into the physical spaces and staff profile you have available.

So, this year students have no certainty and nor have the universities.

In fairness to all involved, there is no "fair" way to give accurate marks without exams. It was always going to have some winners and losers. Once you accept that there is a certain level of unfairness, the key question is "what can be done to be as fair as possible to as many students as possible?". This isn't it. Last minute moving of the goalposts might feel good as a minister trying to show they care, but it is going to create huge problems for both the students and universities.

I feel sorry for the students. They deserve much, much better.