Early Modern Notes

The Little Professor drew my attention to this article by Mark Edmundson, All Entertainment All The Time, and I think I was even more irritated by it than she was. A few main gripes (which partly overlap with hers):

1. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. Edmundson was distressed by student evaluations of a class on the works of Sigmund Freud along these lines: “Edmundson has done a fantastic job,” said one reviewer, “of presenting this difficult, important and controversial material in an enjoyable and approachable way.”

So he’d rather his students found it dull and inaccessible, presumably. He goes on to excoriate them for appreciating the ‘enjoyable and approachable’ aspect without once giving any credit for the other part of the comment: this student has understood that Freud is not only ‘difficult’ but also ‘important and controversial’. It doesn’t seem to occur to Edmundson that making difficult subjects ‘enjoyable’ and ‘approachable’ might be a path to better understanding. He also complains that his students failed to “see intellectual work as confrontation between two people, reader and author": doesn’t that one word, ‘controversial’, suggest that they have in fact understood that in some way? (I wonder how the students themselves would feel if they read his entirely negative reaction to their enthusiasm? Just a little hurt?)

2. “Why hadn’t anyone been changed by my course?” I’m basically repeating the LP here, but this really got my goat: how does he know they hadn’t been changed? (Also, if they hadn’t previously understood Freud’s significance and now did, it strikes me that that’s a worthwhile change in itself.)

3. The ‘critique’ of TV.

TV is a tranquilizing medium, a soporific, inducing in its devotees a light narcosis. It reduces anxiety, steadies and quiets the nerves. But also deadens. Like every narcotic, it will be consumed in certain doses, produce something like a hangover, the habitual watchers’ irritable languor that persists after the TV is off. It’s been said that the illusion of knowing and control that heroin engenders isn’t entirely unlike the TV consumer’s habitual smug-torpor, and that seems about right.

Oh, come on. I mix a fair bit with people who research in audience studies (ie, take the trouble to ask the audiences about their responses rather than making patronising and usually snobbish assumptions about them), so I’ve picked up a lot of their irritation at this kind of crass characterisation of the effects of TV (and film) watching. But personal experience should tell us that this kind of generalisation is utter rubbish. Sometimes I watch TV to be soothed and amused. Sometimes I watch it to learn and be stimulated, or provoked and challenged. Sometimes I slump; sometimes I shout at the screen. Haven’t I written here before about why I love good quality TV history?

4. More generally, how about some evidence for all the generalisations? As ever, there are good points to be found somewhere in the mix. But, as the LP says: “Is there some reason why academics bewailing the decline and fall of academia refuse to undertake anything that looks vaguely like the systematic gathering of evidence?” (And I have to continue her line here, because it’s just so irresistible.)

My own skeptical interpretation of such essays, to be honest, is that they are a wonderful way of inflating one’s vita without having to do anything but contemplate the elegantly decorated interior of one’s own hospitable brain. I suspect that this opinion may not make me well-loved in some quarters, but so be it.

Well, dear Little Professor, it makes me love you even more than I did before.

I sometimes get emails from prospective history PhD students seeking advice. This seemed a good time of year to gather together and set out some of my usual responses in a post.

NB: What follows is geared specifically to the university system that I’m familiar with in Britain. Only some of it will also be relevant to the very different PhD programs of the USA (and other countries); feel free to add further thoughts based on your own experiences there and elsewhere, or useful links.

You should take your time and do plenty of homework. If you’re contemplating doing a PhD (or, indeed, a Masters) next autumn, you do need to be thinking about it now, especially if you’ll be applying for funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) or the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) (and you probably should, even if you don’t think you’ll be successful!), which have strict application deadlines in the spring and complicated application procedures.

What is a British PhD?

The British PhD, essentially, is the PhD thesis (in American terms, you are ABD - ‘all but dissertation’ - from the word go). It is usually defined as a substantial piece of independent research, which should make an original contribution to an academic area or discipline. The PhD thesis is 80-100,000 words in length; the notional period of registration (standard period for funding) is 3 years full-time, and it usually must be completed in 4 years (the funding bodies set this deadline, and they get stroppy with departments that don’t achieve it with the majority of students…); for part-time students, it’s usually 5-7 years. (An MPhil is shorter, with less emphasis on ‘originality’, and many departments initially enrol students for this, ‘upgrading’ them after the first year if progress is satisfactory.) You will probably need at least an upper second class undergraduate degree in history or a related subject and/or a relevant Masters degree to be considered for a place.

Why do a PhD?

Perhaps the very first question you should be asking is if you really should do a PhD. It’s hard work, expensive if you don’t get funding, will eat several years of your life and probably drive you half-crazy in the process. Don’t go into a PhD simply because you can’t make up your mind what job you want or are having difficulty finding one, or because you aren’t keen on working 9 to 5 in an office or wearing suits (all that will seem even less appealing after three years as a research student). If you’re burning with desire to work on a particular topic then you might do it purely for its own sake, but you still need to think about the costs. If what you want is to be an academic historian, then it’s an essential qualification (though not a guarantee of employment; far from it). But otherwise? There are probably better ways to get a well-paid job than doing a history (or humanities generally) PhD. Yes, completing a history PhD will equip you with many skills beyond knowledge of the subject itself, which have value in the workplace beyond academia; the question is how much it really adds that you wouldn’t get simply from doing a Masters degree. Think it through very carefully.

A British PhD is an intensely personal, individualised experience. The only taught element will be research training in the early stages; that may involve a few exams or assessments, but the essential core of the PhD is independent research for the thesis itself. You will (nearly always) choose your own topic (unlike the sciences) and be responsible - with guidance from your supervisor - for designing and structuring the research. Some key issues follow from this.

Where to do your PhD?

The first is: it is not the overall prestige of a university or even a department that counts when deciding where to study. The first and foremost question you have to ask is: is this the right place for the research I want to do? If you can’t simply pack up and go where you please, because of, say, family commitments, don’t assume that you’re stuck with the nearest university whether you like it or not. Look into distance learning options (including the Open University). Think about whether you could commute once a month or so for meetings while using locally based library resources and inter-library loans. Unlike taught courses, it’s not necessary to be close at hand all the time, although you will miss out on some social aspects (and, perhaps, teaching opportunities). Some universities have quite strict rules about postgrads residing within a certain distance of the university; others seem to be more flexible.

You have to start, essentially, by looking for a department with at least one lecturer who will be a suitable supervisor (sometimes you will have more than one, especially if your research is interdisciplinary): someone who has the expertise to guide your research and, equally, someone you can feel comfortable with for three years plus. You’ll be spending a fair bit of time in intensive one-to-one discussions with them; you want someone who will both guide and challenge you, take your ideas seriously, treat you like an adult. There needs to be respect both ways. The precise nature of the ‘ideal’ relationship will depend on your own needs: how independent and mature you are; how much external stimuli you need to meet deadlines; how confident you are when it comes to developing your ideas (but remember, it’s not your supervisor’s job to massage frail egos or nag you into getting work done).

On the academic side, finding someone suitable is relatively easy. In Britain, you can check out the Institute of Historical Research’s list of academic historians, and visit departmental websites; where more specialised MA courses related to your interests are offered (this database is very good), that implies there are staff with the expertise to supervise PhDs. But you should already have an idea from your previous study and reading of historians whose work you respect and enjoy reading. Look them up. They aren’t gods just because they’ve been published. And they do not necessarily have to be specialists in precisely the narrow area in which you want to research (particularly if you’re doing something new); a supervisor who knows too much can actually, I think, inhibit the development of your own ideas. You don’t really want to end up doing their research for them, or feeling that you can’t approach their work critically where it relates to your own.

The personal side is harder. I was fortunate; I knew my supervisor well as an undergrad, I knew he was conscientious, highly knowledgeable and moreover that we were on the same wavelength. (I also knew several of his recent PhD students.) Not everyone can be in that situation. But this is something to emphasise: don’t walk into your PhD without having made personal contact. Don’t just fill in the forms, accept a place and turn up hoping that you’ll like it and they’ll assign you a good supervisor. Doing a PhD will require a lot personal initiative: get in some practice right at the beginning (OK, you can’t just demand a particular supervisor, but you can do a lot to make sure that the person you want chooses you…). If you can, go and meet potential supervisor(s) in person and also take the opportunity to look round the university’s facilities and environment too; if not, pick up the phone and write emails.

Get the insiders’ view

And not just to the staff. Perhaps the best way to find out about a supervisor – and a department and university generally – is from existing students. You could ask them questions like: How often do you get to meet your supervisor, and is it easy to get an appointment? Do you feel comfortable turning to the supervisor about problems like writers’ block or (say) family or work pressures that hold up your work? How long does it take to get work returned? Do you get constructive feedback? Are you encouraged to keep writing (conversely, do you feel under too much pressure to perform, too many deadlines)? Does this supervisor seem to care about their supervisees? And broader questions: What’s the library like? The computing facilities? The research training? Do you feel happy and at home in the department, or do you get treated like cash cows, ignored or condescended to? I don’t think that many prospective research students do things like this – but they really should if they’re planning to go to an unfamiliar institution.

How do you get in contact with students? If you can visit in person, then find out where the postgrad facilities are and go and talk to them. Otherwise, you may need to do a bit of work. Institutions don’t always provide the kind of information that helps to locate research students – unless they’re also on the teaching staff. But there is another way with history students in Britain. You can track them down through the IHR’s list of theses in progress (although it tends to be a bit out of date at this time of year); once you have names, you should be able to get email addresses – or write a letter c/o the department if the university doesn’t have an open-access email directory. The list of theses in progress (and the lists of theses recently completed at the same URL) is an important resource for prospective PhD students in another way: you can find out about the latest doctoral research in your topic area, potentially avoid replicating too closely someone else’s research (remember that ‘originality’ element of the thesis!) and, moreover, find people doing related work who you might want to strike up contacts and share ideas with.

That might be particularly helpful if you’re looking at studying in a department with few research students. Small departments and/or small PhD cohorts have advantages. Firstly, you’re more likely to get more personalised attention and not get lost in a crowd; individually, you (and the fees you pay, to be practical here) are more important to that department; your relationships with staff are likely to be closer and less formal. The thing is that they may well need to be, since there won’t be a large postgraduate community to fall back on for support, sharing of academic ideas and socialising. It’s something else to think about.

NB: check out the research training and facilities

Look at what’s offered in terms of research training - especially if you plan to go straight into a PhD from undergraduate study. Largely because of the demands of the funding bodies, some kind of RT programme is now pretty much ubiquitous. Some, I suspect, are better than others. Ask whether there is training geared to your particular needs as a historian (individually tailored training seems now to be the emphasis of the AHRB, while the ESRC has tended to more uniform approaches), or whether it’s a more general programme taking in students from across the university. Again, get actual students’ opinions (you really don’t want to know what we think of parts of the training in place at Aberystwyth over recent years…). It’s not the most crucial issue - though, frankly, don’t even look at a place that doesn’t offer some kind of RT - but, like library and computing facilities etc, it’s something that might tip the balance in a final choice.

Oh, and it’s worth checking out accommodation costs in the area (both university-owned and the local rental market), since these vary hugely around the country.

I hope to follow up this post with something on how to play the funding game (which is another reason to start communicating with potential supervisors and others who can give you advice that will help you in writing grant proposals). A final reiteration for now, however: don’t rush into anything. For autumn 2005, think in terms of spending from now until Christmas preparing to make your applications. Look around at different places, consider the possibilities open to you. Think hard too about what you do want to do a thesis on, what sources you would use and what facilities it would require. These are things that will need to go into a grant proposal.

Claire has of course decided (quite sensibly) to take a break from blogging at Fenland until her thesis is done (hope it’s going well, Claire). Still, she gives us an occasional update on what she’s been up to, and last weekend she took a trip to north Wales. Which was blowing a gale.

This weekend I went to see Harlech castle. I climbed the tower but it was so damn windy I went straight down again…

I climbed an almost mountain to see a ruined fort. It was so damn windy I couldn’t look at it properly…

I smiled, and found myself on a nostalgia trip. I remember the winds of Harlech. I turned up at Coleg Harlech almost exactly ten years ago, an eager but nervous student desperate to make a new start, get to university, prove something (to myself, mostly). We had a couple of weeks of gorgeous weather – I kid you not, we were sunbathing on this beautiful beach in north-west Wales in October. And then the wind and the rain arrived, and stayed (or so it felt) for the next six months. (I’m sure there were sunny non-windy days, but I don’t remember them.) Most of us lived in a twelve-storey tower block (known as The Block, or, when we got more stressed out, The Pressure Cooker). I was entirely unaccustomed to high-rise living, and was at first totally puzzled by a small phenomenon on the tenth floor: the water in the loo seemed to move. Or was that me being drunk and stoned? (Which happened a good deal, I should point out.) It dawned: the water wasn’t moving, and I wasn’t imagining it in a drug-addled haze. The building itself was swaying very, very slightly. Ah.

We didn’t spend all our time getting drunk (and laid, ahem). We worked damned hard; until quite recently the college’s diploma courses had lasted two years, until the government had decided only to allow funding for a year. And we were packing much of the two-year course into one year; good if you were as impatient to get to university as I was, bad in many other ways, not least the loss of continuity when every year was a fresh cohort. (And it meant that the college had to recruit twice as many students each year to remain viable, of course.) It was a small, close-knit community with no more than 150 students or so, even at full capacity. The walls were thin, we were living in extremely close proximity; it all tended to encourage sociability. (Our crowd on the tenth floor didn’t need much encouraging, come to think of it. Of course, it could all get a bit much too, which is why the Block had its other nickname.) And, unless you’re a real outdoors-activity type of person, there isn’t too much to do in Harlech except study, go to the pub, hold raucous parties (in the rooms and the Common Room, in the houses of students – and sometimes staff – who lived ‘out’, on the beach). We did all these things enthusiastically; and to anyone who thinks young undergraduates can be wild, you should see a bunch of twenty-something-plus students when presented with such an opportunity.

But it was first and foremost about the study (and the Diploma that was my key to getting into university); and it was much more than a standard FE college access course. I did a programme in ‘Literature, History and Ideas’ (which gave you the opportunity to range widely or to focus on a particular discipline, depending on what suited you); we were taught by experienced tutors (many of them respected academics and writers in their fields, although we didn’t really know that at the time) whose generosity with their time and understanding of the anxieties of mature students – who often came with a lot of baggage, personal problems, past negative experiences of education (all too many were dyslexics who had been written off as ‘stupid’), fear of failing again - was matched only by their teaching expertise and knowledge. It was a space in which the stirrings of academic and creative talent could be nurtured, supported, developed.

Few of the staff who taught me are there now. There have been a lot of changes.

Of course, it was obvious to everyone back in the mid-90s that Harlech was going to have to adapt in order to survive. But I’m none too happy about some directions taken since the college merged with (the official language: ‘was taken over by’ seems more accurate) the Workers’ Educational Association (North Wales) in 2001.

For one thing, you will no longer find Literature, History and Ideas in the prospectus. If you want to study ‘traditional’ arts and humanities subjects, you’ll have to go elsewhere, even though the website still proclaims that ‘Coleg Harlech and WEA share a common tradition of liberal arts adult education stretching back over many years’. The only remnants of the one-year programmes offered in 1994 may be in social studies (from the ‘Work, Politics and Society’ programme) and IT (there was IT, wasn’t there? Must try to find my handbook), now to be found alongside art and design, music technology and access to nursing. Even the then thriving drama and media studies programme has disappeared (and I didn’t think you got much trendier than that). And – hang on – what’s happened to Welsh studies? (Relegated, it would seem, to short courses.)

I don’t want to knock any of those subjects. But it feels to me as though Harlech is being turned into just another vocational further education college (the only remaining difference being that it’s residential and the students are older than usual), a place to get qualifications for work instead of a space to think, learn, reflect. What happened, most of all, to Ideas? Perhaps (although I wonder about the wisdom of duplicating what every other FE college does) this is what it takes to survive. But the excision of the subjects that I studied feels like a personal betrayal, as well as destroying a large part of what made Coleg Harlech so special for so many years to so many students who got a second chance there.

Dedicated to those unhappy souls who didn’t make it out of the pressure cooker. If we were a community, we were no better than most communities at looking after our misfits; and we should have been better.

I often like John Sutherland’s columns in the Guardian education section. But the latest (from last Monday, although I only just noticed it) ends with a defence of the indefensible.

The most pernicious reform introduced into higher education over the last 40 years is “continuous assessment” (also called course unitation and modularisation). It is the pedagogic equivalent of CCTV, a monitoring and measuring of student performance from freshman to finalist.

Traditionally, you slacked for eight terms and worked like stink through the ninth, “revising” for the nightmare of finals week. Now you are examined from your first undergraduate essay onward. Hell starts on day one. Modularisation does for higher education what the conveyor belt did for automobile manufacture. No more hours of idleness.

Full disclosure: I loathe exams, and never did particularly well at them (both recalling all the stuff I’d revised and getting it down rapidly in a coherent form on paper were agony). I did significantly better at essays, which I could prepare and write - think about, plan, revise, write properly, as opposed to frantic scribbling - over several days. Which hardly means that I spent every waking second of every semester on writing essays, for chrissakes. (Also, to be picky, exams still made up more than half the assessment of most of our courses.)

I’m not saying that exams per se are not useful, however. What is indefensible is this championing of ‘finals’: assessing three years’ learning in a few weeks, with the possibility (as Sutherland says; I think it was probably extremely rare) of doing virtually nothing for over two and a half years beforehand. Does he really think that was something to be praised? (By the way, much of the article is about how great this system was in giving musical geniuses such as Coldplay time to hone their skills instead of being made to do what they were at university for… But, leaving aside whether you concur in his evaluation of the talents of Coldplay, there seems to be an implicit and pretty dubious argument that the university system should be tailored to the needs of a tiny minority of artistic geniuses.)

Besides, it’s absurd to compare continuous assessment to a conveyor belt (I’ve worked on those production lines in my time, and for longer than I care to remember; I doubt that Sutherland ever has). I never had too much difficulty making time off between essays, even though I probably spent a lot more time on them than the average student. It creates, instead, a more continous short-term cycle of work-idle-work. Individual students make their own choices about exactly how much and when, just as no doubt they did in the ‘finals’ system. And very often the results reflect the amount of work put in over the whole course - as they probably did for most students, whatever the mythology, in the finals system.

By logical extension, perhaps Sutherland also thinks that we shouldn’t ask undergrads to do things like read for weekly seminars either? And as for compulsory attendance at those seminars…

Strange to read all the American academic bloggers posting on their preparations for the new academic year, when over here we won’t be restarting for about another month. (I don’t even know the exact date, since I won’t be doing any teaching until after Christmas…) When I go into the department later this week, the place will still be virtually deserted.

And we’re still in the middle of the clearing frenzy anyway, with thousands of places still up for grabs across the country. I don’t have the energy to write a long post about the stupidity of our admissions system. But it is crazy: through the centralised admissions body UCAS, students have to apply to universities (up to 6 courses, if I remember rightly) several months before they take their A-level exams, and universities offer them places that are conditional on achieving certain, predicted, grades. The students then have to choose just one course out of those offers. If, come August, they don’t get the required grades for that place, the offer will fall through and they have to resort to clearing (or re-apply next year). If they get much better grades than expected, they have to decide whether to stick to that original choice or give it up and take a gamble on clearing in search of a course with higher grade requirements (and therefore, they hope, of higher quality), or re-apply next year. The upshot is stress all round for students, for university staff, for everyone involved. Any chance of reform? You must be kidding.

(Bad puns. Dontcha love ‘em?)

Yes, it’s that time of year in the British education system (except Scotland, where they got Highers results a week ago). The eighteen-year-olds’ A-level results are out (as usual, pictures of pretty girls hugging each other; presumably because the girls continue to do best, though apparently the boys are catching up. Unless it’s because teenage boys are generally less photogenic…), and there are more passes (96 per cent of students get at least one) and A-grades (22.4 per cent) than ever; records have been broken for the fifteenth year in a row. Students in Wales have done particularly well, it would seem.

And so the usual, predictable and over-the-top controversy breaks out. A-levels have been dumbed down. No they haven’t. They’re still the ‘Gold Standard’ (a particularly fatuous piece of rhetoric). No they’re not. Both sides of the quarrel talk copious quantities of bullshit without worrying too much about little things like, well, evidence (even, say, comparing exam papers over periods of time, although the Guardian once looked at sample O-level/GCSE papers from 1951, 1977 and 2001, in English language and literature, history and maths. Interesting exercise). And naturally, all of this is done without real reference to any other countries’ experiences or systems (despite the constant refrains that the A-level is falling behind/matching/surpassing international standards of excellence).

(I’m always rather amused by those who say: ‘go and ask the teachers, they’ll tell you how standards have fallen… or risen’. Because they rarely seem to follow their own advice; and when teachers do comment on this they seem to be as divided as everyone else.)

I don’t have the emotional attachment to the A level that seems to underlie much of this furore. I possess one A-level (a C in Economic and Social History), taken in night classes when I was thinking about returning to education. It was a trial run, no more; if I’d had more time to work at it I’d have no doubt got a better grade. Far more important to me is the diploma I got the following year at Coleg Harlech; it was that qualification that got me into university and I’d argue that I was better prepared by it than any of the 18 year olds with A-levels whom I met. OK, so I’m biased. But, frankly, this annual furore is completely out of proportion. It’s only another qualification. And for the majority of those taking it, it’s merely a stepping stone to the next stage in the system. It matters to them because their entry into university depends on their results, and because – as they and their teachers tell us every year – they have worked hard for it. Too much of the A-level lament does seem to disparage those efforts; no wonder teacher morale is low, you find yourself thinking. Which is not to say that there are no problems. We cannot go the other way and say that we mustn’t criticise the system because we risk hurting the feelings of teachers and students.

There are, I think, a number of reasons why the results have got better and better over the last fifteen years and why the label ‘dumbing-down’ will not do. It needs to be stressed, firstly, that during the 1980s (under a right-wing Tory government, don’t forget), the system for marking A-levels changed from ‘norm-referenced’ to ‘criterion-referenced’. In other words, students were now to be measured against identified standards of achievement rather than being ranked against each other with a set pass/fail rate (the latter had apparently been set at 30 per cent). It’s no accident, surely (even if correlation does not automatically equal causation…), that the record-breaking run starts shortly after the change to criterion-referenced assessment. There’s an obvious, basic, point: since previously not only the pass/fail rate but also the proportions of different grades had been predetermined, this issue could never arise. You couldn’t beat the system (only other students).

However, a system of criterion-referencing (which, theoretically, makes a 100 per cent pass rate possible) means that, year by year, teachers and students can learn how to most effectively focus their efforts to improve, improve, improve those grades. They haven’t got cleverer, but they’ve without doubt got more canny. They’ve also got more and more resources to help them do it: study guides, computers, the internet. It all makes a difference. In fact, it would be more surprising if grades didn’t keep rising, especially as there are other social factors at work.

I’m talking about the big push to higher education; increasingly, middle-class students fear the consequences of ‘failure’, of not getting into the right university, and their parents probably spend plenty of time reminding them. (Seriously, they’re under a lot more pressure to perform, almost from the day they enter school, than my thirty-something generation ever was. Jeez, I used to do most of my homework surreptitiously during the lesson before I was due to hand it in. Assessed coursework? We’d never heard of it. And as for all that testing… poor little buggers.) And there’s a lot at stake for schools too, in this world of league tables and parental ‘choice’. The more historically-minded and thoughtful try to make themselves heard over the clamour every year: we cannot meaningfully compare results today with those of thirty (or even twenty, perhaps even ten) years ago. The syllabi have changed; methods of assessment are different, in ways that are simply incommensurate; the educational and social context has been transformed.

None of this lets the A-level off the hook. Its defence is frequently conducted in terms that are every bit as crass, ill-informed and poorly reasoned as the knee-jerk traditionalists’ criticisms. It goes: critics are merely reactionary defenders of the old elitist order; they want to deny opportunity based on merit; they denigrate all the efforts of students and teachers. There is a loathsome but common political tactic being used: tar all critics and calls for reform, however moderate, with the same extreme and ‘elitist’ brush. We may not ask: hang on, what is the value of a qualification when over 20 per cent of students get As and less than five per cent get Fs? (Shouldn’t it be roughly as difficult to get the top mark as the bottom one?) Or suggest that there might be a need to toughen up marking to redress that imbalance. Because that immediately means that you are placed with those (probably mythical) people who would like to return to the time when only three per cent of teenagers took A-levels in the first place, and nearly a third were automatically failed. Of course it’s dishonest nonsense, but this is politics today.

So, actually, I’ll take the risk of being placed with the old fogies for a moment. I might not agree with the view of David Thomas (CE of the Careers Research Advisory Centre) that standards haven’t risen sufficiently to justify the rise in the pass mark; but I do agree with his point that the A grade now covers too wide a range of abilities. I’m wary of the Telegraph’s call for A grades to be rationed (by implication, for a return to norm-referenced assessment); but I do agree that A-levels are being discredited, and it certainly ought to be made harder to get an A. Most of all, there is a need for properly informed debate, for the standards to be more transparent, and almost certainly for some revision of marking criteria. (Of course, if we weren’t so emotionally attached to the damn things, we might be prepared to accept the proposals for them to be scrapped altogether: bring on the baccalaureate, I say, a view that means the fogies would never have me anyway.)

And this is in the students’ own interests: their achievements should be recognised, but this will not happen while we cannot properly evaluate what those achievements are. As educationalists point out, there are problems with criterion-referenced assessment - clearly exposed in the A-level controversy, of course: difficulties with setting out clearly what the standards are, what the criteria for those standards are, and sticking to them consistently in marking (although the problem of markers’ subjective judgments surely applies to any system of assessment).

A-level grades are becoming increasingly inadequate to universities trying to make decisions about admissions. Even David Miliband the schools lackey minister agrees about that, and there are proposals to provide universities with more detailed information to assist them in their decision-making - not simply overall grades, but a breakdown by individual modules in the course – changes that are actually likely to go ahead. And yet the most important reform that’s needed in this area – for universities to be able to base admission decisions on actual instead of predicted exam results – seems as far away as ever. But that’s another subject.

Update: There is one further reason for the rise in the pass rate, of which I was reminded today:* simply, those likely to fail are weeded out before they get as far as the exams. Schools simply can’t afford to let them mess up their league table ratings. And I didn’t know that the Northern Ireland A-grade rate is 30 per cent. (But does that have anything at all to do with the fact that there the grammar school system is still in place, I wonder? What proportion of Irish students are entered for A-levels at all?)

*By the way, this particular article is complaining about the dumbness of comment on the issue. But it makes at least one pretty stupid mistake of its own. See if you can spot what’s wrong with paragraphs 3-4…

There are claims now that lecturers at Middlesex are being pressured not to fail students.

A memo to staff at the university’s school of computing reminded “all module leaders whose module had a failure rate of greater than or equal to 15%… from last semester please make sure they hand in their full report to their [academic group chair] explaining why they had such a high failure rate and what remedial action they have taken this semester to resolve the situation", reported the Times Higher Education Supplement.

The complaint that this is putting pressure on staff comes from their union (NATFHE): “This looks designed to make people think twice about failing students and will put pressure on staff not to fail too many". The union official also felt that it ‘put the issue in the arena of staff performance, and did not take into account the quality of the student intake’.

But I’m afraid that I can’t help thinking that this is in part about staff performance. And if it is not their fault, then they’re being given the opportunity to explain what the problems really are in the formal report (you know, that academic thing of marshalling evidence, making a case, being rigorous and self-critical?). It may be a tough policy, but if you’re failing that many students, you should be asking some tough questions.

And there’s a different way to look at it, as the article continues: ‘an audit last year by the higher education watchdog, the Quality Assurance Agency, approved the [Middlesex] policy - with the reservation that 15% might be too high.’ The QAA feared that staff might see it ‘as an acceptable failure rate’. Where the union claims that the policy will deter staff from failing (’too many’) students, the watchdog (which should surely have a reasonable sense of what represents an ‘unacceptable’ failure rate) fears that it might encourage them to fail too many… So it all turns on what is ‘too many’, which seems a reasonable area of debate, especially as it might well vary between different disciplines, and the setting of some single benchmark figure is always likely to be problematic. But no doubt we will start seeing this story selectively cited in the media as another example of ‘teachers under pressure to inflate grades’ and ‘educational standards under attack’.*

And another thing. According the university, this policy has been in place for four years. So why has it only become an issue now?

* On the subject of which, A level results are due out this week, and apparently the pass rates will be record-breaking… again. Cue accusations of dumbing-down, lax marking standards etc. But chances are I’ll be posting on that when it comes. Oh, and I might have something to say about the little shop of horrors that is known as ‘clearing’.

So the BBC has conducted a poll that shows that British youth are ignorant of their own history (also reported at the Guardian and Telegraph).

Actually, the poll is about military history. There are some intriguing nuggets thrown up by comparisons of age groups: somewhere along the line, it seems that we stopped teaching children about the Battle of the Boyne (I’m well into my thirties and I knew nothing about it when I left school). Whether that means those older generations were genuinely better informed about the tortured history of Northern Ireland is, I’d venture to suggest, another matter. The generalised anti-Irish prejudice for which mainlanders have frequently been infamous (’No Irish’ to go with the ‘No Blacks’ signs of the ’60s…) might not suggest it.

Traditionalists mouthing off about the state of history education, however, clearly need to be careful. One fifth of over-65s didn’t know (or remember) that the Romans invaded Britain. Overall, 31 per cent of the respondents couldn’t place the Battle of Britain in World War II. Again, there was an age gap: only half the 16-24 year olds got it right. But 1 in 10 over-65s also got it wrong.

Now, wait a minute right there. Generally, how could anyone (in Britain) not know that the Battle of Britain took place during WWII? (I could understand haziness on the exact year.) This is something that’s plastered over the TV and other media on a regular basis. I don’t know how anyone manages to miss it. This isn’t about history education in schools. This is about cultural awareness. And, frankly, amongst the over-65s, I’m slightly surprised that as many as 10 per cent don’t know it. We can’t surely write that off as fading memory; this was a key event for that generation. (And were the pollsters doing any checks, if such things are possible, to distinguish between what had been recently forgotten and what had never really been known?)

And then we get on to the kind of silliness that, to some extent, undermines the whole credibility of these polls. Do we really think that teenagers and young adults who answer ‘Gandalf’ to questions they don’t know genuinely think that Gandalf was a historical person? (Apart from anything else, surely no one who’s ever read Tolkien/watched the films could confuse it with the real world?) In the case of a fictional character like Horatio Hornblower, some confusion might be genuine. But I’d place a few bets that when they say that Gandalf discovered the Americas (6%, apparently), they’re taking the bloody piss. And then you start to wonder: if the respondents weren’t taking this seriously, how can we?

I don’t like these polls. I’ve already hinted that I think the questions they ask are superficial and they don’t tell us much at all about historical knowledge (except within very narrow limits) and even less about historical understanding. (Oh, for the occasional poll that tries to find out what people do know rather than testing for what they don’t.) I like even less that people then claim that the results demonstrate something is horribly wrong with our education system. The basic gaps in knowledge often displayed suggest worrying levels of indifference to history, amongst too many people of all ages, for which you can’t merely blame schools. And if more young people get the wrong answers, does that mean that there’s a particular problem with education now, or has indifference to the past always been higher amongst the young? Is it educational or generational? Would there have been similar patterns in such polls 20, or 50, or 70 years ago?

Because I was there once, too. I didn’t just not know about the Battle of the Boyne when I left school, believe me. I knew bugger all about history (or politics), full stop. And I just wasn’t very interested in knowing more.

(… And then I re-discovered reading - proper reading, not just fluff. And so this article really, really does strike a chord. )

The BBC reports on a ‘brain gain’ of academics to UK universities, mainly in the sciences.

Many are attracted by research opportunities (well, it ain’t going to be the salaries…). One Canadian recruit was also drawn by not having to fight her way through the tenure-track system. (Last month, Cliopatriots mused on its benefits… but you have to get in first.)

But there are also some stark and depressing statistics. “Between 1989 and 2002, government spending per student fell 37% in real terms as the number of students increased by 94%, according to Universities UK, an association of university heads.” “While the United States spent 2.7% of its gross national product on higher education in 2000, Britain spent 1%.”

An alarming situation reported in The Observer yesterday, as noted by The Little Professor, and now also referred to by Jonathan Dresner at Cliopatria. As the LP says, it’s about money; and much of what the article discusses is exacerbated by the gap between what we’re allowed to charge home (and EU) students in tuition fees, and what we can get away with charging non-EU overseas students.

Having said that, I think it’s possible to overstate - or oversimplify - the issues discussed in the article. For example, the allegations that failing students’ marks are being bumped up in order to pass. But the only real evidence given concerns the tiny minority of borderline students. A departmental head has asked lecturers, in cases of marks of 38/9 per cent, with a pass of 40, to “look for the extra 1/2 marks if appropriate and not leave it to the exam board to make this decision". But he’s not asking them to pass clearly failing students; we’re talking about 1-2 percentage points here (and a fair bit of hedging: “where possible"; “if appropriate"). He’s startlingly frank about the money issues at stake. But was this the best the reporter could find in his search for scandal?

But there may be other more serious problems that we’re not noticing at all. One of our PhD students at Aber, who did his first degree in the US, firmly holds the view that UK universities are much softer on first-year undergrads than our US counterparts precisely because we’re so desperate for the extra funding once they’re into 2nd and 3rd year. His emphasis, however, is not on marking, but on the workload, or to be precise, lack of it; in other words, we expect much less than American universities do from our freshers - and indeed, very few fail. Are we expecting enough? [I wrote this before reading Jonathan’s post, so maybe things are changing in the US; after all, my informant’s experience is now going back a few years.]

Meanwhile, the Swansea departmental closures crisis (although I don’t know the ins and outs, even if, like everyone in the University of Wales, I’m hearing a fair amount of rumour) does seem to be about more than expanding the business school to get foreign masters students (the history department is one of those set to benefit too). Which is not to say that it isn’t (a) disgraceful and (b) about money. I’ve had the strong impression that it has a good deal to do with Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) ratings, which directly impact on funding. Swansea wouldn’t be the first university to start cuts and even closures of departments with less than stellar RAE scores (see: Durham).

And yes, I think that some of our universities are treating their overseas postgrad students as cash cows; but that can work two ways. For every accusation of easy passes, you can also find horror stories about foreign students being poorly treated, not given sufficient support - especially with language - and going home with nothing to show for their experience but a large hole in their bank accounts. I have no direct knowledge of either situation, incidentally. My own anecdote, for what it’s worth: at the University of York, where I did my MA, I was always impressed by the support, academic and social, provided for overseas postgrads, and I never heard any suggestion that they were not marked on exactly the same terms as the home students. If the pass rate was high, it might just be because the university set high admission standards for its postgrad students to begin with. (I might add that I didn’t know anyone who failed if they completed their course and the diss - but I did know some who dropped out at an earlier stage. Are those who claim that there are no fails in masters courses taking that into account, I wonder?) So which of these three scenarios is in fact the more representative?

In fact, this article all adds up to pretty dubious reporting: impressions and hearsay - with a mere handful of sources quoted - are used to draw some sweeping, sensational conclusions, when at best what the author has is a case for concern, indicating the need for further investigation. The nearest thing to any hard evidence is that departmental head’s email. Is there really a major “scandal"? I’m not suggesting the problem doesn’t exist, but I’m not yet convinced that it’s “endemic". And I’d really like to see a searching investigation into whether overseas students in the UK are getting good value for money - because I strongly suspect that that’s a much more serious - and common - problem than giving them easy rides.

The BBC reports the creation of a new university, the largest in Wales by some miles, with the merger of University of Wales Cardiff and the University of Wales College of Medicine, to be known as Cardiff University (see the press release). The new university will no longer be a constituent part of the University of Wales (although it will be ‘affiliated’, whatever that’s likely to mean).