A new ranking system for students, and only a bureaucrat could have come up with it
June 13th, 2009 at 12:55pm
It must be a year with a 2, a 5 or a 9 in it, because the bureaucrats have decided to overhaul the ranking system for students wishing to enter tertiary studies.
The good ole University Admission Index (UAI) is dead, and is being replaced by the “Australian Tertiary Admission Rank” which…try and get your head around this one, will have scores “higher than equivalent UAI ranks which may push up course entry scores at universities” but will have a lower maximum score.
In a show of true political correctness “we can’t let people get a perfect score in case others don’t feel just as perfect” methodology, the new top score will be 99.95.
So, everyone gets a higher score and feels better as a result, but nobody is able to get a perfect score. I see how this could backfire very quickly…with scores being effectively squeezed in to a narrower band, students are going to miss out on entry to their preferred course or university by smaller margins, which will probably make them feel somewhat hard done by.
Here’s the really amusing part of all of this though, Kim Paino of the Universities Admission Centre is urging students not to worry:
The scaling process for students will be the same, the rank order of students will be the same, and the same applicants will be selected for the same uni courses
So, if the only thing which changes under this new scheme is the end score, why do we need a new system? There is only one good answer to that question, and it is this: it keeps our bureaucrats in a job, pushing paper for the sake of pushing paper.
It’s a shame that we have wasted money on a pointless new system, when that money could have been better spent on school maintenance or, shock horror, actually educating students.
Now there’s a thought…actually educating students in schools. Oh Mr. Rudd, what happened to your “education revolution”? Did you accidentally empty a sauce bottle on it during your shaking of said bottle fairly?
Samuel
Entry Filed under: General News,Samuel's Editorials
