This week, I’ll look at news from around the world of higher education.  I’ll skip the US because regular media coverage of the ongoing disaster seems adequate.  Instead, let’s start in the United Kingdom, and specifically in England.

Term is just starting over there, so we have yet to see any US-style nightmares, but that’s definitely in the cards.  As far as I can tell, the re-start plan is closer to the US than to Canada’s: less than 100% in-person classes, but still considerable contact and students are encouraged to live in the community surrounding their campus (in England, there is a much stronger tradition of leaving home to go to uni than there is in Canada, which in a COVID era means the first week or two back means floods of people from high-COVID areas to low-COVID areas, with implications for community transmission).  Mostly, the push to keep universities open has come from the need to keep international enrolment high, and for the moment that seems to have been successful.  But the bigger issue is that in this year when everyone is worried about social distancing, the sector is looking at record enrolments in part due to an almighty screw-up in the country’s matriculation exams.

There are a few things to know about England for the rest of this story.  The first is that they are fixated with class and minor gradations of privilege, which is one of the reasons they love university rankings.  The second is their very highly stratified university system.  The gap in prestige between the top research universities (the Russell Group) and the rest is significantly greater than the gap between the U-15 and other universities here, and the gap between the top three (Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial) and the rest of the Russell Group is bigger than the gap between UBC/U of T/McGill and the rest here.  These are both features, not bugs, of the English system.

They are also invested in testing for the school-leaving certificate (known as the “A-level”) as a gold standard for measuring “ability”, and hence for being an objectively fair measure for who gets into the top places in the stratified system.  This is pretty common in Europe and Asia, but few have curriculum-based tests that are so brutally narrow as the A-level, concentrating only on three subjects which take up the entirety of the last two years of secondary school.  Of course, as is true everywhere where high-stakes testing is the norm, the system gives undue advantage to students from privileged backgrounds.  Again, a feature not a bug, and combined with the other two factors, a pretty-much guaranteed recipe for replicating class across generations.

Now this year, added to that potent mix are i) COVID and ii) a government that makes mostly baffling decisions.  If we were running a contest for most shambolic administration in the western world, the Trump folks would undoubtedly win, but the Downing Street Clown Posse seems determined to place.  

Faced with the impossibility of running a full set of A-level examinations in May during the peak of the first phase of the pandemic, the government asked teachers to provide “predicted grades” for all students.  So far, so good: that’s essentially how universities in Canada award places: on the basis of work done up to about halfway through the final year of secondary.  But England demands rigid, technocratic exactitude in its exam results – otherwise, how could the precise, stratified hierarchy of the admissions statements be maintained?  So the government, which believed these marks to be “optimistic” (i.e. too generous for too many students) proceeded to “adjust” the results with an algorithm which was, if anything, more blinkered and class-biased than the Tory Party itself.  Which takes some doing.

This video explainer from the Financial Times’ Chris Giles explains it better and in more detail than I can in the short space available, but briefly, the algorithm “corrected” results for each student based on previous results from that school.  Basically, it threw out actual grades, and simply substituted a new set based on the rank-order of grades in that school, fitted to the distribution of final A-level grades from that school in previous years.  Simplified, if you were a particularly bright student from a school that typically didn’t have a lot of students with top exam results your scored got adjusted downwards, while if you were a weak student at a school that normally sends tons of students to Oxford or Cambridge or wherever, then your score was adjusted upwards. 

(That is, unless you were in a small school in which very few people took a given subject, in which case your “optimistic” grades stood unchanged.  But since those were nearly all posh private schools, that was OK with the Johnson government).

Yes, it was that inept.  People inside the ministry knew it was a disaster months in advance, but the Secretary of State for Education, Gavin Williamson, with the unjustified confidence that only true ignorance can produce, insisted on going ahead.  Then he backtracked, saying schools could appeal.  Or students could apply to unis based on their mock examination results instead.  Or anything, really – he just twisted in the wind for days long past the point where any decent person would have resigned for gross incompetence, but since ministerial accountability is dead in Westminster, he is still there.

The problem for universities was that they had been told there would be no growth in student numbers this year.  This is a long-standing back-and-forth fight in English higher education: whether institutions should have the freedom to choose as many students as they want (neo-liberal to some, pro-access to others), or whether the government should set an overall cap (pro-quality to some, shameless budget-cutting to others).  Early in the COVID crisis, the government had taken advantage of the need to social distance to slap the cap on.  But now, faced with a considerable chunk of poorer students being deprived of a university place based on an algorithm apparently bought off-the-shelf at BUFFOONS R US, the government caved and told the universities, essentially, to just let everyone in.  Meaning that on top of trying to deal with the daunting reality of trying to re-open in COVID, institutions must figure out how to cram in a bunch of extra students, too.

Just another reason to avoid high-stakes testing.

Tomorrow: Qatar.