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Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

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Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#161

Post by rayiner »

ceejayoz wrote: post #132
patanegra wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always the same argument. If you are world-class talent (someone who gets to Oxford), you should be capable of similar results as kids from independent schools. Like Joe Seddon did ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Seddon - growing up with a single parent mom, working as a therapist in NHS). It isn't fair to ask ones to have 4A* and others to have just 3As. Only 1 in 2600 gets 4 A . And 1 in 83 gets 3 As. Maki…

> Only 1 in 2600 gets 4 A. > And 1 in 83 gets 3 As. And what if that’s not always an indication of which person is smarter ?

But we know that it’s true. That’s why we have been using objective metrics like test scores for millennia, across societies are different as China, India, and Britain.

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#162

Post by afavour »

cvwright wrote: post #138
afavour wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> gives me a strong hint about the kind of person it's being talked about. There was no person being talked about, though. This is a discussion about Oxford's university ranking. The GP brought up a person entirely irrelevant to that discussion and informed us of his views on a topic that's also irrelevant to the discussion.

How are the grades of a student in a prestigious position at Oxford not relevant to the academic reputation of Oxford?

My objection was not the student in question being mentioned. It was why he was mentioned: his views on Charlie Kirk, a US culture war topic that has nothing to do with the discussion and nothing to do with the student’s admission grades.

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#163

Post by adw »

growse wrote: post #23
abxyz wrote: post #2

pg thinks this is because of letting in poor people: https://xcancel.com/paulg/status/1969334665375813679

> Kids worrying that Oxford and Cambridge will discriminate against them are among the smartest in the country. pg's lack of awareness that this has basically always been true smacks of naiveté.

Target Schools was a thing in the 90s. This isn’t even slightly new. (And last I checked the Target Schools students had, if anything, slightly better outcomes than the main pool.)

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#164

Post by KaiserPro »

abxyz wrote: post #2

pg thinks this is because of letting in poor people: https://xcancel.com/paulg/status/1969334665375813679

I love how logic escapes PG.

If it was because of the poor people, then Oxbridge would still be winning, as they are the only ones that have entrance exams & weird interviews still.

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#165

Post by KaiserPro »

indy wrote: post #13

If academic performance is no longer the main criteria for admission then it's no surprise that Oxford's ranking has gone down.

If you'd bothered to research then you can see the academic performance is the main criteria for entrance. They spend the rest of the time sifting the top 10% academically to boil it down even more.

https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/courses/admiss...

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#166

Post by fidotron »

abxyz wrote: post #76
patanegra wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is extremely unfair framing. Oxford University has been discriminating people from independent schools for a while now. To get in, you need 4 A* from an independent schools, or just 3 As from state schools. That's not "letting in poor people" as you framed it. It's letting in dumber people, worse students. Lots of that is mainly based on classism (against people from middle class), racism (against white people).…

It is a very fair read of Paul's take. I attended one of the worst secondary schools in the country. Less than 10% of my year earned the qualifications necessary to go on to university. I know that many of these people, who have gone on to be successful in life, would have excelled at an independent school and would have excelled at university. They were in poverty, not stupid. You cannot compare the achievements of…

> You cannot compare the achievements of a student at an independent school to those of a student at a state school based on grades. State school and independent school are a fundamentally different educational experience.

While I agree with this as a conclusion, I believe you cannot really go there without acknowledging that this has been a deteriorating situation ever since most of the UK abolished the grammar schools.

"Comprehensive" education has done nothing except result in the oppression of the very people it claims to be liberating.

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#167

Post by KaiserPro »

Halan wrote: post #117

It doesn’t matter. UK education is flawed already by the time a student reach tertiary. A levels leave such a gap in people that I would go as far as adding it to the reasons for the country issues. People in the UK, even if they study at Oxford, are likely more ignorant than many Europeans having done classical studies in high school.

> People in the UK, even if they study at Oxford, are likely more ignorant than many Europeans having done classical studies in high school.

wait so you're saying an entire country is rubbish because oxford has a worse classics degree than an unspecified country in Europe?

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#168

Post by abxyz »

dan-robertson wrote: post #130
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brown is a shit school? That's a level of elitism I don't often encounter.

“Mmm, heck of a school. Weren’t you at Brown Otto?” I think you’re confusing a statement about ranking in a small set (Ivy League schools) for a statement about a bigger set. This isn’t uncommon – iirc there was some big furore a few months ago about admissions to US schools where much of the disagreement seemed to be downstream of different people thinking about different numbers of top or acceptable universities (a…

it’s like saying you earn six figures, everyone knows that means $110,000.

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#169

Post by [deleted] »

ceejayoz wrote: post #132
patanegra wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always the same argument. If you are world-class talent (someone who gets to Oxford), you should be capable of similar results as kids from independent schools. Like Joe Seddon did ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Seddon - growing up with a single parent mom, working as a therapist in NHS). It isn't fair to ask ones to have 4A* and others to have just 3As. Only 1 in 2600 gets 4 A . And 1 in 83 gets 3 As. Maki…

> Only 1 in 2600 gets 4 A. > And 1 in 83 gets 3 As. And what if that’s not always an indication of which person is smarter ?

[deleted]

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#170

Post by JetSetWilly »

owlbite wrote: post #159

So my experience with moving from a Cambridge undergrad to an Edinburgh postgrad, albeit a couple of decades ago now, was the expectations between the two were nowhere comparable. Cambridge if you'd not done the homework before the tutorial, you got sent packing for wasting everyone's time, but in Edinburgh it was common for all but the best students to only start the homework at the tutorial (thus wasting their oppo…

Your anecdote doesn’t contradict the story - the University of Edinburgh doesn’t appear in the top 20 so apparently their “rankings” don’t think highly of the University of Edinburgh either.

(Also Edinburgh isn’t a redbrick, it was founded in 1583)

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