A tweet in which MP Iain Duncan Smith complains about how bad the Withdrawal Agreement is, followed by replies from all of twitter reminding him that he and all the other Tories voted for it
A tweet in which MP Iain Duncan Smith complains about how bad the Withdrawal Agreement is, followed by replies from all of twitter reminding him that he and all the other Tories voted for it
Because as we all know, it's supposed to be the other way around!
At this point, we should just agree to whatever tariffs mean we don't need to comply with dynamic regulatory alignment.
It's strange that I, a remainer am now advocating for a Hard brexit, but here we are.
Being stuck in a situation where we have to comply to a set of standards we have no say over in all our trade deals is the "vassal state" situation none of us wanted.
The irony that Brexit screamed about a situation that didn't exist, then goes on to potentially create it is not lost on me.
EDIT: Just so we're clear, I completely understand the EU's point here. We want better access than any other 3rd party to the SM AND the ability to undercut the EU. It's pure cake-ism.
Karl on
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daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
At this point, we should just agree to whatever tariffs mean we don't need to comply with dynamic regulatory alignment.
It's strange that I, a remainer am now advocating for a Hard brexit, but here we are.
Being stuck in a situation where we have to comply to a set of standards we have no say over in all our trade deals is the "vassal state" situation none of us wanted.
The irony that Brexit screamed about a situation that didn't exist, then goes on to potentially create it is not lost on me.
EDIT: Just so we're clear, I completely understand the EU's point here. We want better access than any other 3rd party to the SM AND the ability to undercut the EU. It's pure cake-ism.
I'm not entirely sure that's an option exactly. Any deal with the EU is going to involve certain regulations covering the goods in question, say jams for example. No matter the tariff applied, the EU is going to want the jams to meet some level of food safety and whatnot, and if the EU changes their standards to become more strict on the subject, I don't think there's going to be some increased level of tariff that would convince them to allow the UK to not comply with their new regulations. I mean if the Ford Pinto thing happened these days (where getting rear ended would tend to punch a hole in the gas tank, with tragedy resulting) I don't think the EU would be OK with modifying their auto safety standards but letting imports of the car continue simply because the USA (technically the importers, but whatever) was paying some silly high tariff rate on them.
Though maybe I'm misunderstanding the exact situation being talked about here.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
At this point, we should just agree to whatever tariffs mean we don't need to comply with dynamic regulatory alignment.
It's strange that I, a remainer am now advocating for a Hard brexit, but here we are.
Being stuck in a situation where we have to comply to a set of standards we have no say over in all our trade deals is the "vassal state" situation none of us wanted.
The irony that Brexit screamed about a situation that didn't exist, then goes on to potentially create it is not lost on me.
EDIT: Just so we're clear, I completely understand the EU's point here. We want better access than any other 3rd party to the SM AND the ability to undercut the EU. It's pure cake-ism.
I'm not entirely sure that's an option exactly. Any deal with the EU is going to involve certain regulations covering the goods in question, say jams for example. No matter the tariff applied, the EU is going to want the jams to meet some level of food safety and whatnot, and if the EU changes their standards to become more strict on the subject, I don't think there's going to be some increased level of tariff that would convince them to allow the UK to not comply with their new regulations. I mean if the Ford Pinto thing happened these days (where getting rear ended would tend to punch a hole in the gas tank, with tragedy resulting) I don't think the EU would be OK with modifying their auto safety standards but letting imports of the car continue simply because the USA (technically the importers, but whatever) was paying some silly high tariff rate on them.
Though maybe I'm misunderstanding the exact situation being talked about here.
There is no argument against complying to EU regulations when trading with the EU. The issue is, we're asking for better access than any other 3rd party (IE fewer tariffs). The EU is only willing to accept that if we agree to dynamic regulatory compliance. This means we have to use EU regulatory standards in all our trade deals with other countries. This is to prevent us from undercutting them.
That's fair enough. We're asking for access to the SM that is close to membership level AND the ability to undercut the EU. That's a unicorn Brexit.
However agreeing to dynamic regulatory compliance when we're not part of the EU means we have no say in how standards are agreed, but we have to follow them in all our trade deals outside of what we do with the EU.
It's not something I'd want.
EDIT: The whole "you need to use EU regs in all your trade deals" is specifically mentioned in the "level playing field" topic.
At this point, we should just agree to whatever tariffs mean we don't need to comply with dynamic regulatory alignment.
It's strange that I, a remainer am now advocating for a Hard brexit, but here we are.
Being stuck in a situation where we have to comply to a set of standards we have no say over in all our trade deals is the "vassal state" situation none of us wanted.
The irony that Brexit screamed about a situation that didn't exist, then goes on to potentially create it is not lost on me.
EDIT: Just so we're clear, I completely understand the EU's point here. We want better access than any other 3rd party to the SM AND the ability to undercut the EU. It's pure cake-ism.
I'm not entirely sure that's an option exactly. Any deal with the EU is going to involve certain regulations covering the goods in question, say jams for example. No matter the tariff applied, the EU is going to want the jams to meet some level of food safety and whatnot, and if the EU changes their standards to become more strict on the subject, I don't think there's going to be some increased level of tariff that would convince them to allow the UK to not comply with their new regulations. I mean if the Ford Pinto thing happened these days (where getting rear ended would tend to punch a hole in the gas tank, with tragedy resulting) I don't think the EU would be OK with modifying their auto safety standards but letting imports of the car continue simply because the USA (technically the importers, but whatever) was paying some silly high tariff rate on them.
Though maybe I'm misunderstanding the exact situation being talked about here.
There is no argument against complying to EU regulations when trading with the EU. The issue is, we're asking for better access than any other 3rd party (IE fewer tariffs). The EU is only willing to accept that if we agree to dynamic regulatory compliance. This means we have to use EU regulatory standards in all our trade deals with other countries. This is to prevent us from undercutting them.
That's fair enough. We're asking for access to the SM that is close to membership level AND the ability to undercut the EU. That's a unicorn Brexit.
However agreeing to dynamic regulatory compliance when we're not part of the EU means we have no say in how standards are agreed, but we have to follow them in all our trade deals outside of what we do with the EU.
It's not something I'd want.
EDIT: The whole "you need to use EU regs in all your trade deals" is specifically mentioned in the "level playing field" topic.
Ah, got it. But wouldn't that position then allow for the whole chlorinated chicken coming in from the USA thing to happen? Or whatever the specific worry is there.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
kids from poorer areas getting massively downgraded from their predictions, and 93% of total adjustments being downgrades at least a single letter grade
Rami on
Steam / Xbox Live: WSDX NNID: W-S-D-X 3DS FC: 2637-9461-8549
kids from poorer areas getting massively downgraded from their predictions, and 93% of total adjustments being downgrades at least a single letter grade
An interesting aspect of it is that, by disclosing the methodology at the same time as the results, the SQA have made certain that every journalist poring over it for their take is publishing it in an environment where people are reading it in the context of what this means for their child
Whereas if they had released it a month ago, the issues would be the same but the criticism of it would have been less pointed and high profile, and probably less knee jerk (because every education journo this morning has been racing to get their byline in)
All other issues aside it's an interesting misstep
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daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
kids from poorer areas getting massively downgraded from their predictions, and 93% of total adjustments being downgrades at least a single letter grade
Not exactly per this article. You can't quite squirrel out exactly how many estimates went down an entire grade. That's a minor nitpick though considering that the SQA seems to have said that 'your school isn't good, therefore you can't possibly be this good'. Is this going to be used to hit schools' funding in addition to screwing over the students' futures?
This year’s exams diet was cancelled for the first time in history due to the Covid-19 pandemic – with grades instead based on teacher estimates. But almost 124,000 entries have been adjusted down as the SQA ensures grades are kept within "the tolerable range for that grade at the centre".
Education Secretary John Swinney said that “133,000 entries were adjusted from the initial estimate” - around a quarter of all entries.
He added: “6.9 per cent of those estimates were adjusted up and 93.1 per cent were adjusted down, with 96 per cent of all adjusted grades changed by one grade."
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
Schools funding in Scotland is controlled by local authorities, not central government
There isn't a system that ties funding to exam results. To the extent that there is a variable funding model it's tied to indexes of deprivation
There's a breakdown in the sqa announcement of adjustments by SIMD (Scottish index of multiple deprivation) which explicitly shows that the majority of adjustments have been applied to the most deprived students
Oof. If it were the Tories they could effectively just say yeah well poor people are thick so what and sail on. The benefits of your brand being utter bastardy.
Also for clarity with respect to the above, "Higher" is the name of the qualification, not an adjective
In Scotland, pupils typically sit Highers in the fifth year of secondary school or first year of FE college having left school, optionally Advanced Highers in the sixth year of secondary school
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BethrynUnhappiness is MandatoryRegistered Userregular
One of the reasons this is so incendiary is that there are many teachers and people in education policy circles who argue that systematic examination favours the wealthy - that is, on average, pupils of equivalent ability underperform in exams if they are part of a deprived cohort.
So this feeds into the side of the debate that takes as a starting assumption that exams aren't a fair reflection of ability for social reasons and that attainment gaps are a product of that rather than a reflection of ability.
One of the models for CfE (the Scottish government's education reform programme) was predicated on that assumption and proposed abandoning exams altogether for some subjects, replaced with continuous assessment.
The estimates also aren't pure judgement, in most cases teachers have formally assessed coursework and prelim exam results to work from. The SQA methodology didn't take those into account, but they're probably going to be the evidence underpinning a substantial proportion of the appeals.
The really interesting outcome is if the majority of those appeals are successful and the pro-continuous assessment faction get to declare that they were right all along
Oof. If it were the Tories they could effectively just say yeah well poor people are thick so what and sail on. The benefits of your brand being utter bastardy.
Statiatically, poorer, more deprived kids struggle more. (Generally, it's the stress of the struggle, etc.) It's the response to that that defines. So, yeah.
If it's anything like in the US, it's about getting more funds. Schools that 'do well' do well.
It's not, we don't have that funding model
There's a second order effect in that local authority areas with wealthier residents have more money with which to fund schools, but there is targeted Scottish government cash which tries to make up that shortfall.
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BethrynUnhappiness is MandatoryRegistered Userregular
One of the reasons this is so incendiary is that there are many teachers and people in education policy circles who argue that systematic examination favours the wealthy - that is, on average, pupils of equivalent ability underperform in exams if they are part of a deprived cohort.
I'm fairly skeptical of it being the exams, and not the massive differences in resources, class sizes, truancy issues, disruption in classes, underpoliced bullying and so on you see in more impoverished schools. Yes, one-shot exams are definitely more punishing on those with dyslexia, dyscalculia, anxiety, or other learning difficulties, but the proportion of students with those issues isn't even close to large enough to explain the overall discrepancy by itself. The objective, imo, should always be to invest in state schools to get them up to the standards of private schools.
As to the actual situation... I feel like the SQA probably had more duty to the students here than to maintaining standards, even if the teachers' estimates were very out of line with past results. You have an obvious defence that these are exceptional circumstances and accidentally failing people with good abilities based on heuristics is a worse case than overestimating students' abilities. Admittedly, this may kick the can down the road to universities who may find out that all the applying students have made their required grades and have to retract offers (I don't know but assume university offers works like airline tickets, in that a certain number of failures are expected when handing out offers). Whether universities would be any fairer in who they eventually extended offers to in that scenario, I can't guess.
Yeah, one of the issues is that these are the grades that determine whether or not people meet the conditional offers made by universities
To a certain degree unis are already planning around the fact that this year they're getting a cohort of uncertain ability. It would be interesting to know the impact on admissions - for instance, if granting the students the benefit of the doubt in terms of estimated grade made no material difference then it makes this seem particularly cruel.
Both FM and DFM argued that had the results not been reduced from teachers’ assessments the most deprived pupils’ results would have been historically high and suggested they would not have been credible.
So they decided to do something else that isn't really credible either but does happen to screw over a lot of kids by making them fail exams they never took?
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
Both FM and DFM argued that had the results not been reduced from teachers’ assessments the most deprived pupils’ results would have been historically high and suggested they would not have been credible.
So they decided to do something else that isn't really credible either but does happen to screw over a lot of kids by making them fail exams they never took?
I mean, do you want poor kids to succeed?
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Brovid Hasselsmof[Growling historic on the fury road]Registered Userregular
"You can't possibly have done that well because previous students from your broke dumb shit school never did that well."
I feel really bad for these kids. The system is so screwed up. I know how shafted I would have been if I'd gotten the grades half my teachers probably thought I deserved rather than what I actually got on exam day. It just seems so brutally unfair to place your fate on one day in your entire life, a day these kids had no control over whatsoever.
I think I'd also always have my predicted grade and a link to an article on my CV too.
I'm hoping whoever did this curve fitting adjustment for the maths exams has been tarred and feathered in particular.
The IB also had a huge scandal about this, they used an “algorithmic scorer” to predict grades but refused to release the algorithm for external scrutiny.
Seems like if you were set to graduate high school in 2020, in any country, you have been well and truly fucked over.
For me the mocks were the shock to get me to pay attention to the actual exams.
Which worked because I went up one or two grades in almost every subject, so this would have sucked for me.
But hopefully future schools and employers will take this into consideration. Colleges and Universities are probably going to be desperate for students anyway, and sometimes they can be understanding about these things.
(I got into an IT degree despite having an F in IT, thanks to the school screwing up and not giving us the necessary work to make it up over the year. My explanation was accepted because all the students from my school were telling the exact same story)
The big university admissions story this year is they’re having to ban unis from making unconditional offers on the proviso that you only apply to them. It’s pretty clear that uni has become so expensive again that if you can afford to go you’ll find a place somewhere.
Agreed - far too expensive : (
If it was up to me, tuition would be 10x less than what it is currently
No idea how my students do so well while juggling 2 jobs to pay tuition. They are awesome
Myself, I had tuition fully paid by the government where I grew up and went to uni (outside of the UK) - feels unfair students I'm teaching now don't get the same opportunity
Agreed - far too expensive : (
If it was up to me, tuition would be 10x less than what it is currently
No idea how my students do so well while juggling 2 jobs to pay tuition. They are awesome
Myself, I had tuition fully paid by the government where I grew up and went to uni (outside of the UK) - feels unfair students I'm teaching now don't get the same opportunity
not to diss your students but most of uni these days is cramming stuff into your head a week before the exam and then hoping you can jackson pollock your mental diarrhea into something coherent. There's only a handful of them spending any appreciable amount of time in the library.
not to diss your students but most of uni these days is cramming stuff into your head a week before the exam and then hoping you can jackson pollock your mental diarrhea into something coherent. There's only a handful of them spending any appreciable amount of time in the library.
I think that depends on the course. Mine was 80% coursework and 20% exams (which was a shame, as I suck at the former but tended to do better on the latter).
In other news, Madame Tussauds have unveiled their latest incredibly lifelike model:
Agreed - far too expensive : (
If it was up to me, tuition would be 10x less than what it is currently
No idea how my students do so well while juggling 2 jobs to pay tuition. They are awesome
Myself, I had tuition fully paid by the government where I grew up and went to uni (outside of the UK) - feels unfair students I'm teaching now don't get the same opportunity
not to diss your students but most of uni these days is cramming stuff into your head a week before the exam and then hoping you can jackson pollock your mental diarrhea into something coherent. There's only a handful of them spending any appreciable amount of time in the library.
Agreed - far too expensive : (
If it was up to me, tuition would be 10x less than what it is currently
No idea how my students do so well while juggling 2 jobs to pay tuition. They are awesome
Myself, I had tuition fully paid by the government where I grew up and went to uni (outside of the UK) - feels unfair students I'm teaching now don't get the same opportunity
not to diss your students but most of uni these days is cramming stuff into your head a week before the exam and then hoping you can jackson pollock your mental diarrhea into something coherent. There's only a handful of them spending any appreciable amount of time in the library.
Posts
A tweet in which MP Iain Duncan Smith complains about how bad the Withdrawal Agreement is, followed by replies from all of twitter reminding him that he and all the other Tories voted for it
And i'm sure UK will be just fine, for some.
Because as we all know, it's supposed to be the other way around!
It's strange that I, a remainer am now advocating for a Hard brexit, but here we are.
Being stuck in a situation where we have to comply to a set of standards we have no say over in all our trade deals is the "vassal state" situation none of us wanted.
The irony that Brexit screamed about a situation that didn't exist, then goes on to potentially create it is not lost on me.
EDIT: Just so we're clear, I completely understand the EU's point here. We want better access than any other 3rd party to the SM AND the ability to undercut the EU. It's pure cake-ism.
I'm not entirely sure that's an option exactly. Any deal with the EU is going to involve certain regulations covering the goods in question, say jams for example. No matter the tariff applied, the EU is going to want the jams to meet some level of food safety and whatnot, and if the EU changes their standards to become more strict on the subject, I don't think there's going to be some increased level of tariff that would convince them to allow the UK to not comply with their new regulations. I mean if the Ford Pinto thing happened these days (where getting rear ended would tend to punch a hole in the gas tank, with tragedy resulting) I don't think the EU would be OK with modifying their auto safety standards but letting imports of the car continue simply because the USA (technically the importers, but whatever) was paying some silly high tariff rate on them.
Though maybe I'm misunderstanding the exact situation being talked about here.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
There is no argument against complying to EU regulations when trading with the EU. The issue is, we're asking for better access than any other 3rd party (IE fewer tariffs). The EU is only willing to accept that if we agree to dynamic regulatory compliance. This means we have to use EU regulatory standards in all our trade deals with other countries. This is to prevent us from undercutting them.
That's fair enough. We're asking for access to the SM that is close to membership level AND the ability to undercut the EU. That's a unicorn Brexit.
However agreeing to dynamic regulatory compliance when we're not part of the EU means we have no say in how standards are agreed, but we have to follow them in all our trade deals outside of what we do with the EU.
It's not something I'd want.
EDIT: The whole "you need to use EU regs in all your trade deals" is specifically mentioned in the "level playing field" topic.
Ah, got it. But wouldn't that position then allow for the whole chlorinated chicken coming in from the USA thing to happen? Or whatever the specific worry is there.
kids from poorer areas getting massively downgraded from their predictions, and 93% of total adjustments being downgrades at least a single letter grade
An interesting aspect of it is that, by disclosing the methodology at the same time as the results, the SQA have made certain that every journalist poring over it for their take is publishing it in an environment where people are reading it in the context of what this means for their child
Whereas if they had released it a month ago, the issues would be the same but the criticism of it would have been less pointed and high profile, and probably less knee jerk (because every education journo this morning has been racing to get their byline in)
All other issues aside it's an interesting misstep
Not exactly per this article. You can't quite squirrel out exactly how many estimates went down an entire grade. That's a minor nitpick though considering that the SQA seems to have said that 'your school isn't good, therefore you can't possibly be this good'. Is this going to be used to hit schools' funding in addition to screwing over the students' futures?
There isn't a system that ties funding to exam results. To the extent that there is a variable funding model it's tied to indexes of deprivation
There's a breakdown in the sqa announcement of adjustments by SIMD (Scottish index of multiple deprivation) which explicitly shows that the majority of adjustments have been applied to the most deprived students
Edit:
(First tweet I found with a decent crop, but the account is apparently that of an education researcher)
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
In Scotland, pupils typically sit Highers in the fifth year of secondary school or first year of FE college having left school, optionally Advanced Highers in the sixth year of secondary school
One of the reasons this is so incendiary is that there are many teachers and people in education policy circles who argue that systematic examination favours the wealthy - that is, on average, pupils of equivalent ability underperform in exams if they are part of a deprived cohort.
So this feeds into the side of the debate that takes as a starting assumption that exams aren't a fair reflection of ability for social reasons and that attainment gaps are a product of that rather than a reflection of ability.
One of the models for CfE (the Scottish government's education reform programme) was predicated on that assumption and proposed abandoning exams altogether for some subjects, replaced with continuous assessment.
The estimates also aren't pure judgement, in most cases teachers have formally assessed coursework and prelim exam results to work from. The SQA methodology didn't take those into account, but they're probably going to be the evidence underpinning a substantial proportion of the appeals.
The really interesting outcome is if the majority of those appeals are successful and the pro-continuous assessment faction get to declare that they were right all along
Statiatically, poorer, more deprived kids struggle more. (Generally, it's the stress of the struggle, etc.) It's the response to that that defines. So, yeah.
If it's anything like in the US, it's about getting more funds. Schools that 'do well' do well.
It's not, we don't have that funding model
There's a second order effect in that local authority areas with wealthier residents have more money with which to fund schools, but there is targeted Scottish government cash which tries to make up that shortfall.
As to the actual situation... I feel like the SQA probably had more duty to the students here than to maintaining standards, even if the teachers' estimates were very out of line with past results. You have an obvious defence that these are exceptional circumstances and accidentally failing people with good abilities based on heuristics is a worse case than overestimating students' abilities. Admittedly, this may kick the can down the road to universities who may find out that all the applying students have made their required grades and have to retract offers (I don't know but assume university offers works like airline tickets, in that a certain number of failures are expected when handing out offers). Whether universities would be any fairer in who they eventually extended offers to in that scenario, I can't guess.
To a certain degree unis are already planning around the fact that this year they're getting a cohort of uncertain ability. It would be interesting to know the impact on admissions - for instance, if granting the students the benefit of the doubt in terms of estimated grade made no material difference then it makes this seem particularly cruel.
2020 in the nutshell
I mean, do you want poor kids to succeed?
So glad I'm not a kid having to deal with this.
There is going to be a week of heart wrenching headlines as straight A students from deprived schools are marked down.
The SNP are fucking idiots for not seeing this coming.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
I'm hoping whoever did this curve fitting adjustment for the maths exams has been tarred and feathered in particular.
Seems like if you were set to graduate high school in 2020, in any country, you have been well and truly fucked over.
Which worked because I went up one or two grades in almost every subject, so this would have sucked for me.
But hopefully future schools and employers will take this into consideration. Colleges and Universities are probably going to be desperate for students anyway, and sometimes they can be understanding about these things.
(I got into an IT degree despite having an F in IT, thanks to the school screwing up and not giving us the necessary work to make it up over the year. My explanation was accepted because all the students from my school were telling the exact same story)
If it was up to me, tuition would be 10x less than what it is currently
No idea how my students do so well while juggling 2 jobs to pay tuition. They are awesome
Myself, I had tuition fully paid by the government where I grew up and went to uni (outside of the UK) - feels unfair students I'm teaching now don't get the same opportunity
not to diss your students but most of uni these days is cramming stuff into your head a week before the exam and then hoping you can jackson pollock your mental diarrhea into something coherent. There's only a handful of them spending any appreciable amount of time in the library.
I think that depends on the course. Mine was 80% coursework and 20% exams (which was a shame, as I suck at the former but tended to do better on the latter).
In other news, Madame Tussauds have unveiled their latest incredibly lifelike model:
it's both 100% accurate and total nightmare fuel.
Thus has it always been
AND ALWAYS WILL BE!
CHUG! CHUG! CHUG! CHUG!