ABSTRACT
The former polytechnics, which concentrated on professional fields such as business studies and journalism, have been renamed universities, but popular discourse refers to them as "new" universities and maintains that "old" universities are superior. "Argument" is a key term in the codes that confront the student writer both at school and in university. In the United Kingdom, this has been recognized in the granting of funding by the Leverhulme Trust for research into the teaching and learning of argument in school and university. When a student proceeds to an A-level course (typically at age seventeen), he or she exchanges a broad curriculum with seven compulsory subjects for in-depth, narrowly specialized study in two or three subjects, studied over two years. The Teachers' Guide emphasizes two criteria—viz., "argument" and "personal response" or "personal involvement". At one level, the emphasis on the personal is, of course, examiner code for candidates' need to avoid the stock, prepackaged answer.
