In UK universities there is a daily erosion of integrity • Hacker News Board

Re: In UK universities there is a daily erosion of integrity

#211

Post by triplesec » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 5:04 PM UTC

Universities in the UK have turned into administrator-heavy (as in the US) property development companies made to enrich the administrators and top brass, it seems. Here's a story that hints at the issues (UCL and others have been doing this a lot) https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/25/studen...

While looking for this, I also found this, (slightly off-topic, but somewhat salient) which makes for sobering reading. https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/bnk3vm/vices-most-evil-un...

Re: In UK universities there is a daily erosion of integrity

#212

Post by MaxBarraclough » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 5:05 PM UTC

kingkongjaffa wrote: post #129

gaius wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me it is an elitist view that when you provide a service to the unwashed masses, it must be of lower quality But it must be. An institution with AAA A-level students can teach more advanced material at a faster pace than one that admits EEEs. This is surely obvious, no? It doesn’t mean anyone is better or worse in a moral sense, it just means more or less academically able.

Not at all. The ability to learn at university is not correlated with A-level results. Mastery of the material can help give a good starting point, but I've worked with fantastic E/D/C students and terrible AAA students.

> I've worked with fantastic E/D/C students and terrible AAA students

The existence of outliers doesn't disprove a correlation.

Re: In UK universities there is a daily erosion of integrity

#213

Post by icc97 » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 5:11 PM UTC

nunya213 wrote: post #202

icc97 wrote: post #93

This compounds some major long-term problems for education in the UK. 1. Their school systems are the most elitist/unequal in Europe [0] (from this TED talk [1]). There are many things I love about the UK but I can never go back as the school I send my child to now for free would cost £4000-6000 per year of post-tax income in the UK. 2. Because of underpaying teachers (In comparison to Belgium the mid-level art teach…

Honestly that's just kind of cute. Good private schools in the US regularly cost over $40,000 per year.

I'm talking about an average school for ages 4-11.

But this is not a competition about who has the most expensive schools.

I'd rather live in a country where education is free.

Re: In UK universities there is a daily erosion of integrity

#214

Post by Malarkey73 » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 5:29 PM UTC

candiodari wrote: post #208

Malarkey73 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I understand you correctly. Nobody had run a 4 minute mile before Roger Bannister. Now lots of people have so standards must have dropped.

How is that in any way equivalent to your claim, which just so we're clear, is that now 50% of the population (and implied even near 100%) now has the intellectual standards that only 3% of the population had a mere 20 years ago ? One reason for ever improving records is that we just further explore the long tail of human performance. A decent number of factors that get this one event going would be coincidences, and…

Nope that's not my claim. Try reading what I wrote.

Re: In UK universities there is a daily erosion of integrity

#215

Post by smt88 » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 5:29 PM UTC

mistermann wrote: post #180

smt88 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is rampant in the US as well. Many of the students cheated to get in, sometimes with the umiversity's knowledge, and weren't fluent enough in English to participate in class. There are lots of companies writing essays and otherwise facilitating the admissions cheating, and several major universities were caught a few years ago (I believe Duke was one).

I've read many anecdotal stories like this of students complaining that the quality of their education is suffering due to a large portion of the class being utterly not qualified to be there, dragging everyone else down. I think it also has interesting potential long term implications for relative national competitiveness if you think about it regardless of whether that is a goal or not.

> complaining that the quality of their education is suffering due to a large portion of the class being utterly not qualified to be there, dragging everyone else down

I'm not sure why those students are complaining...

The wealthy foreign students aren't participating in class much, which effectively makes the class size smaller. They're also subsidizing the degrees of all the Americans. And a lot of them end up going back home after graduating, so they're not even competing in the same labor pool.

Re: In UK universities there is a daily erosion of integrity

#216

Post by peoplewindow » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 5:35 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #151

peoplewindow wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Er is it a questionable scenario? UK universities all have very similar businesses, customer bases, staff unionisation levels and risk profiles. It's quite imaginable that if there was a sudden drop in the number of students attending university they might all get in dire straits simultaneously.

They have very different financial reserves, especially the Russell Group ones, and this also presumes that the government would let its entire tertiary education system collapse without intervening.

Well, the intervention is to change the pensions, surely. And the goal is to intervene before a collapse occurs rather than afterwards.

If the argument is "we don't need to change the university pension scheme because when they go bankrupt the government will bail them out", I suppose that should be made directly.

Re: In UK universities there is a daily erosion of integrity

#217

Post by drharby » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 5:44 PM UTC

maze-le wrote: post #81

thinkingemote wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've anecdotes from two university lecturers on different courses. They both want some form of external moderation. its what happens for Postgraduate degrees after all. What they report is horrifying: * Essay writing skills are lacking, "its at GCSE level" * Students contesting any form of criticism - they go via the official channels to argue why they should get a good grade. All schools are tied up in multiple trib…

2 of my friends work in HR. They tell me, that they see a university degree not as a valuable certification criterion on its own. I mean, the tech industry has always been a bit special in this regard. There are lots of excellent autodidact programmers, that never saw a university and there are a number of people that have specialized in getting good grades, but could not implement 10 lines on their own. Most recruit…

If people are considering degree marks for a senior role, they have big things to worry about than if their candidate can whiteboard

Re: In UK universities there is a daily erosion of integrity

#218

Post by patricius » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 5:44 PM UTC

guitarbill wrote: post #210

patricius wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a cost on society, not on the individual pupil, just like how the education is a gain to the society at large, while the individual effort of the individual may seem negligble. What is society in this sense but a collection of many individuals that pay, through taxes, to a common pool? Perhaps society gains, perhaps it does not. We can never know. The services are still paid for. > So of course it's free. You…

You must be American. People have laid out how this "free" services, like education or healthcare, can lead to a more productive, fairer society (e.g. less people off work sick, because they go and get treatment sooner, and recover sooner). Or why do you think tech companies offer good health care? Out of the kindness of their heart? No, because having people worry about basic needs and not get medical treatment when…

> You must be American.

I'm Danish :-)

> People have laid out how this "free" services, like education or healthcare, can lead to a more productive, fairer society (e.g. less people off work sick, because they go and get treatment sooner, and recover sooner).

I can point you to countless articles, anecdotes and videos showing the exact opposite.

> Or why do you think tech companies offer good health care? Out of the kindness of their heart? No, because having people worry about basic needs and not get medical treatment when they need it is counter-productive.

I don't disagree on your statement about basic needs, and as your own example illustrates, these can be served by the private sector. But the reason most companies in the US offer healthcare to their employees goes back to the time of FDR, when it was illegal for a while to compete on wages but not on benefits (if I remember correctly).

> But it seems like all you care about is how many taxes you pay, and how much you get back for it. Fair enough, if you're selfish and have no compassion for your fellow countrymen and the next generation that much, we won't be able to sway you.

I care about the taxes everyone pays. It seems paradoxical to me to claim, for example, to care about the poor and at the same time make everything expensive through taxation.

Re: In UK universities there is a daily erosion of integrity

#219

Post by PeterStuer » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 6:27 PM UTC

frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #197

PeterStuer wrote: post #56

It's the infestation of 'market' philosophy that is the grindstone on the academic values. Everything gets beaten into submission of an amoral self-referential quantitative utility framework. This has become so ingrained that many, if not most, don't even see it as a choice but simply accept it as some sort of universal law.

>amoral self-referential quantitative utility framework My goodness, that's quite a phrase. What do you actually mean?

Which part is confusing you?

Re: In UK universities there is a daily erosion of integrity

#220

Post by collyw » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 6:47 PM UTC

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #209

collyw wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignorance is bliss.

Don't listen to the media and you are uninformed, listen to the media and you are misinformed. I know which I prefer.

Probably the media you listen to with an opinion like that.