ABSTRACT
The education sector has contributed to the politician’s dilemma by the past approaches adopted. In the elite system of the 1970s gaining a degree, however merited, was very much like joining a golf club, except the criteria for joining were not as explicit as those of the golf club! Undergraduates were expected to go through the same level of pain as their tutors had done and the task was to restrict entry to the club, firstly at the input (recruitment stage) and secondly at the output stage. The pain was made greater by the mystery that the club imposed on its applicants by not being particularly clear about the criteria required to pass the degree (beyond, of course, gaining 40 per cent in each of 10 or so examinations in the finals). The arcane process of classifying the award added to the mystery, especially where such classification was based upon rules which
allowed discretion to the Examinations Board to alter the outcome irrespective of the mathematical result. This was the process of members of the club ‘knowing an upper second when I see it’. They were probably able to articulate what they meant as long as such articulation was restricted to the confines of the Board and not written down as something to be aimed for and certainly not conveyed to the student. If that happened there would be the possibility of lots of students achieving the class they aimed for! This would be seen as a clear fall in standards and one which traditionalists would avoid by standardizing marks through norm referencing rather than maintaining criterion referencing! Norm referencing is a breach of standards, since it makes the assumption that the standard achieved by a student is dependent not upon some baseline criteria but upon how well his or her peers do in comparative terms at that particular time and place. The whole external examining system was based upon the need to pretend that standardization could be achieved across the country by having a travelling circus of elders who collectively knew what a ‘first’ was rather than coming clean about the outcomes that the sector required of its graduates. Evidence from the Graduate Standards Programme demonstrates that academics from different disciplines in fact, have very different views about matters of classification (HEQC, 1995a).
