Post by H BergeronIt has always seemed to me that PQA is a great idea,
Right. Can you imagine doing *anything else* the UCAS way?
Apply to Sainsbury, Tesco and your corner shop with your shopping
list, they say "come and look round", some of them turn you away,
others say "you can have these things if ...", you choose "firm"
and "insurance" shops, and if you finish up with too little money
for either, you get another chance with Aldi? But ...
but that
Post by H Bergeronimplementing it is bound to seriously inconvenience at least one of
school/colleges, the exam boards and the universities.
... the problem is in the nitty-gritty. It's a nice idea,
but we can't get there from here. It *always* falls apart when you
look at the details, and has been doing so for over 30 years to my
personal knowledge.
The real, deep-down, underlying problem is that there is no
way of significantly shortening the time-scale. We start around now,
with yr12 students getting info about courses and univs, and visiting
some, then yr13 students and schools completing ~400K UCAS forms, a
*massive* bureaucratic process to get those to ATs, then consideration
and visits and interviews, more massive bureaucracy to sort out offers
and acceptances, marrying with results, clear-up in August, deal with
things like accommodation, book-lists, etc, and start in late Sept at
univ.
A genuine PQA would mean dealing with around seven months
[essentially irreducible] of events PQ instead of the current one
month or so. So we would have to start the univ year at Easter,
or get A-level results at Easter, .... And then of course there's
all the detail -- we can control what happens to UK A-levels, but
not IB results or UK students going elsewhere. And if we shift the
univ year, it's not too big a problem for maths, but subjects like
botany, agriculture, civil engineering, geography are affected by
weather, so you can't just run the same course at a different time
of year. What about the transition period, with some students on
an October start, others on April? And so on. And when you've
done it, you have hundreds of thousands of tweenies who can't go
round the world because they have to be on hand to visit univs,
but have nothing much to do for eight months [instead of three]
between school and univ. Problem after problem after problem once
you start trying to flesh out what starts as a nice simple obvious
improvement.
"But Clearing works!", I hear everyone say. Yes, because
70%+ of the students aren't in it, because all the UCAS forms are
all there ready to go, because all the popular courses that have
the hard decisions to make are already full, and because Matthew
is prepared to give up his summer holiday every year. You can't
run the entire scheme as a super-clearing process.
So the practical proposals are false PQA. You don't apply
to univs in [say] November, but instead you apply *provisionally*
in November, go on visits, etc., and we say what we *would* do with
you if you *did* apply. *Then* the process might work, but the
light eventually dawns that it's not really any different from now.
Well, very marginally, in that it gives a little more flexibility
to applicants who change their minds, at the expense of making it
harder for univs to gauge numbers and policies. But it's not that
"interesting".
Perhaps the real point of all the above is that, for all its
blindingly obvious faults, the present system has *evolved* over
several decades. We can be sure that it is close to a local optimum,
for that is what evolution does. There will be tiny perturbations
from time to time, but broadly it follows that any *major* change
will make things worse ... until the revolution.
Post by H BergeronCan anyone, especially the ATs who post here, provide any info and/or
informed speculation about how and when PQA come about?
Hard info, no. Informed speculation -- it won't happen for
the foreseeable future. Something may well be proposed, but there
will be so many detailed problems that it will eventually be kicked
into the long grass.
If, mirabile dictu, it comes about, then another parameter to
note is that the university year *cannot* be changed at short notice.
There are too many medium-term commitments. It takes three years from
"Senate approval" to implementation [and six+ to full implementation
if there are transitional arrangements for students on course]. I'd
be surprised if the entire UK sixth-form system or the assessment
timetable can be turned around any faster.
So, if *you* were to propose a PQA scheme *today* that was
broadly acceptable, it will take a year for objections to roll in
and be dealt with, another year to get it into a fit state for
implementation, and three years "notice" before it actually happens.
That's 2010. I shall be long retired by then, and my children will
have finished university. So I shall no longer care .... YMMV.
--
Andy Walker, School of MathSci., Univ. of Nott'm, UK.
***@maths.nott.ac.uk