The John Batchelor Show
Image: A bird’s-eye view of Eton College by David Loggan, published in his Cantabrigia Illustrata of 1690.
Joseph Sternberg, @josephsternberg, @WSJOpinion, WSJ editorial board Political Economics column; in re: More important than the virus: The education of high-schoolers passing into university. The A-levels. These tests are very important, being the only way a British student can enter university. Everything stopped with the pandemic, is now become chaos: Govt dvpd an algorithm to solve everything, but forty per cent of students’s schoolwork was downgraded [irrationally]. The algo punished poor students. The bureaucrats just made it up. State schools were disadvantaged because the algo assumed that if your class was bigger, your teacher wouldn’t be able to grade you very well. Students at expensive schools were given an advantage. Another failing: extremely bright students were assumed not to be as good as their actual grades showed. Re-established Victorian England: if you went to Eton, you won; if not, you lost.
