Yesterday when the OT (Occupational Therapist) turned up, it was a person who saw Meg about a year ago and was surprised by the changes that she saw in her – of course since then we have had the hospital visit and then the moving of a bed downstairs. She is going to make the case for a ‘floor’ bed rather than a hospital bed which lowers to a low position, thinking this might be safer for Meg in the long run. She is also investigating whether adaptations to the wheelchair might help to keep Meg in a more upright and less slumped position in the chair – we shall have to wait and see what happens. This morning, I was awoken at 5.00am in the morning as Meg was uncomfortable but I did what I could do singlehanded before the carers turned up at 8.00am. We got about half and hour’s extra sleep which is always welcome.
Today is the day when the ‘A’-level results are announced to students and is evidently a day of great anticipation for all, joy for some, disappointment for others and general tension all round. In Leicester Polytechnic, the admission of students through ‘clearing’ if students did not quite achieve the grades for their first choice of university/course was decentralised to each individual course or group of courses. It was stressful for us staff because we had to take enquiries over the phone, ascertain whether they had enough points at ‘A’-level to satisfy our own course requirements and then make a provisional offer of a place. So we had a pro-forma upon which we could take the essential data and give a provisional ‘Yes’ ‘No’ or ‘Maybe’ – all of which depended upon how the market was operating in that particular year. Typically, we needed to enter clearing to get the course up to its full complement and if we fell short, this meant that we had fewer students in the system, less resources and ultimately perhaps even staff redundancies. If we over-recruited then as a college we were penalised by the funding bodies – so it was almost as stressful for us as admitting tutors as it was for the students (and their parents with whom we were not supposed to deal) as it was for the students themselves. This is the background to one of the best practical jokes I have ever played. We ensured that absolutely on the stroke of 9.00am my son would phone in as a ‘fake’ student and by appearing to be busy we ensured that one of our fellow tutors, who I shall call Robert, would answer the phone. Then my son went his well-rehearsed script which ran as follows. Would the following collection of ‘A’-levels gain admission to a degree course in Public Administration – an ‘A’ in Classical Arabic, a ‘B’ in Equine Management and a ‘D’ in Catering Studies (these are fictitious ‘A’-levels by the way). Robert replied with some surprise at such a mix of ‘A’ levels that it appeared to meet the points total we were demanding and now for the name. So our son spelled out the letters of a surname ‘P’ ‘H’ ‘A’ ‘C’ ‘E’ and then the letters of a first name ‘U’ ‘D’ ‘I’ ‘Q’ – in order to fully appreciate what this name sounds like it has to read aloud, first name followed by Surname. So ‘Udiq’ was offered a place on our degree course until the rest of the tutors informed our colleague who and what he had accepted. My son won £5 for his part in this joke which was probably the easiest money he has earned in his life. Not to be outdone, the daughter of a colleague phoned up the same colleague at the same time of day with an application number which looked correct but was equally fictitious. When the application form with the erroneous number could not be located, the daughter went into a torrent of invective such as ‘Call yourselves a Department of Public Administration – I doubt you could organise a (party) in a brewery! Do I wish to take a place with as shambolic an administration such as this!’ and so on and so forth. The daughter earned herself £5.00 as well. I do not want to give the impression that these practical jokes were typical or frequent as trying to make sure that the course recruited with reasonable students was a stressful activity.
On a more serious note, after we had several cohorts of graduates, I decided to undertake a piece of statistical work to see if we could predict the class of degree earned from the admission profile. In statistical terms we were looking for a correlation between the points total at ‘A’-level and the overall average grade achieved at the end of the degree course. We found that the association was very low (of the order of 0.25 on a scale which rums from -1 to +1) but we did find that ‘O’ level grades (or more specifically the grades achieved from the best five ‘O’-levels taken at any one sitting) had a better predictive ability than ‘A’-levels. Then we went ahead and complemented this statistical analysis with a bit of what is called ‘qualitative analysis’ Now Meg as the tutor who organised work placements for the ‘sandwich’ element of the degree often had a detailed knowledge of personal circumstances which it was necessary to have to ensure that the ‘best’ students were put forward for the most suitable placements. Although no personal or confidential information was disclosed, Meg supplied the information that approximately 30% of the students that we recruited had suffered a severe trauma at some point in the lives between the ages of 15-18. This could be anything from an illness of self or a parent, to a change of school or a marital dissolution. So now we had some kind of explanation as to why many of our students had a reasonable profile at ‘O’level, had under performed in their ‘A’-level examinations and then realised some of their true potential when they eventually graduated with good degrees some years later. This process was known by some as ‘precious metal recovery’ but it did help us to refine our admission procedures in the light of our more detailed researches. I repeated the same type of analysis at the University of Winchester with broadly similar results. These two investigations did not leave to published papers as such but had a fair degree of ‘political’ impact (for example in Council for National Academic Awards submission documents) that we needed to prepare at regular intervals.
© Mike Hart [2024]