As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
Actually 3 Bs from someone who's have to overcome a hell of a lot of difficult circumstances and self-motivate completely because there was no-one there to push them is a hell of a lot more valuable than 3 As from someone in a private school with pushy parents and private tutors.
No it isn't, it is still lower grades no matter personal circumstance.
However as a socialist your solution as usual is to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator and penalise the middle classes having already scrapped most grammars which were the best chance to get to Oxbridge the working class ever had
Yes it is, actually. "Socialism" has nothing to do with it. I'm not even a socialist.
We all know you're a grade snob so this is to be expected, but you're wrong.
Besides, I didn't say a BBB was better than an AAA. In fact of course in most cases the AAA will be valuable. However there may be circumstances where the BBB is in fact more valuable.
You are a leftwing Tory hater.
In most cases BBB would normally be barely enough to scrape into Southampton let alone Oxbridge and it would be ridiculous of Oxbridge to lower its grade total so far to admit more from comprehensives.
There may be a case to favour an AAA comp student over an AAA private school student, there is no case to favour a BBB comp student over an AAA private school student
It is entirely conceivable that the BBB pupil is more intelligent and harder working than the AAA one. In that case it is better for Oxford (dunno what this "Oxbridge" shit is) and by any sane standards more just and more desirable that the BBB pupil gets the place, subject to the very important proviso that the BBB pupil can make up the ground lost by worse schooling, in time to benefit from the Oxford course.
A friend of mine studied some Classics degree at Oxford, maybe the one Boris studied? In any case she was from a state school and found it almost impossible to keep up as most of her peers had studied greek and latin at their private schools, whilst she had not.
She got a 1st anyway.
In that case, your friend will almost certainly have scored very highly in the Classics Language Aptitude Test (CLAT) when she applied, and thus was admitted on merit, not as a charity case. Oxford has been doing this for years, and it's a much better solution than some crude handicapping system.
On the other hand, it's a great pity if she wasn't able to acquire the languages to a comfortable level, since that's one of the main pleasures and joys of the course.
I didn't say she was a "charity case". She is one of the most intelligent people I've ever met. My point was to highlight yet another advantage those who go to private school have and how she had to work much harder to achieve that 1st than they probably did.
I'm not disagreeing with you entirely. Getting a First if you read for Course II (where you start the languages from scratch) is less common, and the people who manage it are indeed impressive. On the other hand, the scope of Course II is narrower relative to Course I, concentrating on one language rather than both, and the first year is largely dedicated to intensive catch-up work, so inevitably the average Course II candidate will simply have read and covered less by the end of the degree.
Still, it helps Classics to survive and be enjoyed by more people, so it's not all bad.
Latin was both my best and favourite subject at school. Touch of the Billy Elliots about it except unlike him I caved in and went STEM instead. Others spoke, authority figures, and I did it their way. Regrets, I have sixty two, and this is one of them.
I knew you were basically sound, kinabalu. Oddly enough, I started off school certain that I was going to become a scientist, and only did my volte-face to languages and humanities a little later, though not from any special pressure.
I think a big mistake many arts graduates make is to assume that science grads are completely illiterate in the arts whereas science grads also know how to get to Covent Garden, or Bayreuth for that matter, read voraciously, and can tell a Monet from a Manet.
My father remembered the V1 "doodlebugs" well and said everyone soon learnt to ignore them if the engine was running but to take cover as soon as it cut out! Of course with the V2 you got no warning at all.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
Actually 3 Bs from someone who's have to overcome a hell of a lot of difficult circumstances and self-motivate completely because there was no-one there to push them is a hell of a lot more valuable than 3 As from someone in a private school with pushy parents and private tutors.
No it isn't, it is still lower grades no matter personal circumstance.
However as a socialist your solution as usual is to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator and penalise the middle classes having already scrapped most grammars which were the best chance to get to Oxbridge the working class ever had
Yes it is, actually. "Socialism" has nothing to do with it. I'm not even a socialist.
We all know you're a grade snob so this is to be expected, but you're wrong.
Besides, I didn't say a BBB was better than an AAA. In fact of course in most cases the AAA will be valuable. However there may be circumstances where the BBB is in fact more valuable.
You are a leftwing Tory hater.
In most cases BBB would be barely enough to scrape into Southampton let alone Oxbridge and it would be ridiculous of Oxbridge to lower its grade total so far to admit more from comprehensives.
There may be a case to favour an AAA comp student over an AAA private school student, there is no case to favour a BBB comp student over an AAA private school student
Indeed. 'Grade snob' is also a rather bonkers term - as if high academic attainment were just a bit of inappropriate showing off best avoided in polite company.
No, @HYUFD is genuinely and objectively a grade snob in any case, regardless of today's discussion.
OK, I am a grade snob.
I would prefer to be operated on by a surgeon with A Grades in Science and a first in Medicine than someone who got D Grades at A Level and failed his Medical exams multiple times.
As indeed would anyone sane not obsessed with equality of outcome
Your example is stupid. I don't care what A Level grades my surgeon got so long as they passed their medical exams. I wouldn't even care if they failed their medical exams first time of asking as long as they passed subsequently, or what university they went to, so long as they are good at their job.
No, it is entirely relevant.
You said grade snob. That includes medical exams. On your basis a surgeon who failed his medical exams multiple times and scraped through on the final attempt is just as good as a surgeon who passed first time with top marks
How do you know they're not?
Wasn't it found that patient ratings of doctors are uncorrelated with exam success or even clinical effectiveness?
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
And AAA from Gasworks St Comp is a better predictor of a first class degree in the end than from Eton, I suspect, from observations amongst my friends - all more or less equally bright in their wats but some of the ones from proivate schools had less staying power when the magisterial lash was removed and thet had to self-motivate much more once at Uni. Though all got goods and productive careers in their ways.
I think the point is that from some schools a BBB from Gasworks St Comp is a better indicator than AAA from Eton.
That assumes that knowledge imparted at school is not really important at university.
A mathematics professor of my acquaintance was, several years ago, having to run supplementary basic maths courses for his first years. Since a chunk of the incoming students couldn't differentiate or integrate with any faculty, or ease - for example.
That is an A-level maths quirk: some years back a lot of calculus was stripped out in favour of probability and sets. Social scientists and computer scientists were happy, physical scientists less so.
The GCSE syllabus no longer covers calculus, but it is dealt with in great depth in the basic A Level Maths syllabus, the main omission being the lack of any study of calculus from first principles. The need for additional courses for university freshers is more down to the fact that many chose to study maths at uni after taking only Mathematics at A Level, whereas university courses start from the premise that they have also studied Further Maths at A Level. So students start without any knowledge at all of many topics encountered only at Further Maths, imaginary numbers being but one example, and they need to acquire a rudimentary knowledge of these very quickly in order to progress.
I don't believe calculus was ever part of GCSE. I did GCSE (1990, A) and A-Level (1992, maths, and calculus - from first principles - was literally the very first thing we studied in A Level.
It's unlikely that you studied it truly from first principles at school. Because a first-principles exposition needs to begin with a definition of the real numbers. A bit advanced for school, I'd say.
--AS
I only studied maths at school, not at uni (Traditional and Modern Maths at O, Maths and Further Maths at A).
I certainly covered real and imaginary numbers, calculus from first principles (proof was one of the questions in my Cambridge entrance exam), topology, and sets. Statistics was the one area that was notably absent.
I'm not disagreeing with the idea, but we might be talking about different "first principles". Without a formal definition of limit, you really can't define derivative*, and this needs an axiomatization of the reals that is definitely beyond school ability. I would guess that your "first principles" definition of derivative used an informal definition of limit. That's what I did at school too and it's fine, but it's not first principles because the limit definition is fudged.
I'm impressed that you did topology at school, though. Metric spaces only, or point set topology? Did they have enough examples to illustrate the concepts? Topology imo only got interesting when applied to function spaces.
*yes okay pure maths nerds, you can define derivative through measure theory independent of the reals, good luck teaching it to schoolchildren!
--AS
Topology was pretty basic. Things like Mobius strips, the bridge problem. Basic stuff.
Nice. I was also lucky to have a teacher who took us well beyond A-level (though it's a shame he was an algebraist and geometer). Much of my career was made on the back of the enthusiasm he inspired.
--AS
Great maths teachers at secondary school level are rare indeed. I certainly never encountered one.
New cases now trending down - and given the number of tests, positivity rate too - admissions & deaths still a horror show:
Going to be that way for a long time to come. You can't have days and days of 60k cases and not end up with lots of deaths.
Deaths might get up to 2.5k per day at the peak.
Don't think so. We are currently seeing a lot of backfilling (Christmas/NY deaths now being reported. No date of death is over 800 yet. Cases thankfully starting to fall (still very high) and yes that means deaths are baked in, but things should be moving in the right direction now.
Happily a lot of people have done just that - its called competition. Don't like Compass or Bidfood or the other big players? Plenty of smaller operators who don't have shareholders to enrich who operate on more realistic margins.
Wholesale is a bloody brilliant industry to work with. Enterprising, innovative, warm.
Yes, exactly. It's a very competitive business, the barriers to entry aren't enormous, and margins are thin.
Which is why I know that the accusations about 'rip-offs' and 'Tory donors' and CEO pay are garbage.
Surely the issue is - and it's one Richard you are missing, that Compass is a catering company - it is not a wholesale company and it is therefore trying to do a job which would be better done by someone else who has experience of that area.
Yes I can see why Compass has been tasked with doing it - it's they job to feed school children at Lunchtime but they have then decided to do a job which would have been better offloaded elsewhere.
That's a fair point, but I imagine that the reason is that they have spare capacity, but the normal wholesalers (and indeed supermarkets) don't, so the latter didn't bid for the contracts.
Fair point, I hadn't considered that.
Have to wonder what the contract basis was. Remember that last Monday, most primary schools in the UK were open as usual, and expecting to stay that way. (Was it really last Monday? I feel like I've been supervising homeschool forever.)
So, most likely, the whole thing was a mad rush to get something together. That might explain the shambles, but doesn't excuse the shoddiness. The lack of someone internal saying "This isn't on."
Vouchers or cash remain a much better solution, though.
If that is his technique, I do not want to be jabbed by someone who sticks the needle in then leaves it swinging while he moves his hand to the plunger (if that is what they call it).
Rule One on a ward; never let a doctor do a procedure like that. Nurses do them far better.
Just imagine what the daily death figures would be if we didn't now have drug therapies that were not available in the spring. A lot of lives have been saved.
Deep breath and here is a good time to look at the by 'Date of Death' figures.
It will get worse I'm sure as figures add in, but currently the worst confirmed day of this wave is 7/1, which is the 14th worst day overall. Perhaps the reporting date figures are bumpier this time round or perhaps the worsening of 'Date of Death' numbers is still in the pipeline.
I really hope that, for once, Mr Ed's hunch is correct and Trump is not impeached.
The GOP are screwed if Trump is able to stand in 2024. They won't be able to win with him and they won't be able to win without him.
The moment he enters the primaries there will civil war in the GOP. Half the party have seen the light, the other half are doubling down and on their knees quivering in fear at the QAnon types.
The only way I see out of this for the GOP is for Trump to be disbarred from elective office. That way he can't even stand as an independent if he loses the GOP nomination. None of the mini-Trump wannabes would have anything like the same pulling power. I think that is why the saner wing will seriously
(For some reason I was unable to respond directly to Mr Ed. Kept getting a message saying my comment was "1 character too short")
According to the BBC the vote on the second impeachment will be around 8.00pm tonight, our time. I suspect that will slip a bit but it seems very likely to be passed and the only question is how many Republicans support it.
The challenge for vaccinations comes after 12 weeks, when the 1st batch loop back around and there are still millions wanting their first dose.
We can wait. Nan needs her second jab.
Quite.
If we can provide first jabs to key tiers within the 12 weeks, then they can have their second jabs without taking the place of equally vulnerable people.
1564 deaths today, the highest yet. The urgency of vaccination really cannot be overstated.
Do you think vaccination alone solves this? Or will it require more than just vaccination? Testing testing testing. Wack a mole. Public compliance on measures for years to come?
Is there now too much emphasis on vaccination as magic bullet, in the bigger picture we are losing our way?
Vaccination won't come fast enough to save the hospitals in this wave. But I think it will prevent any subsequent wave from being comparable to our first three.
"I think it is more the smart ones don't go into politics, just the dregs".
There is some truth in that. I went to a well-known public school - not Eton, thank god - and there are a couple of people I remember who've done well in academia, the arts, etc and elsewhere. One of the people who was considered hugely unremarkable and conventional has become an MP. As mentioned, politics just isn't appealing to many more well-rounded or particularly interesting people any more.
The point about entitlement raised below is also relevant, though. If you're unremarkable but entitled, both in terms of your opportunities, routes to power and attitude, it's more likely to be your own prejudices, rather than any particularly interesting or independent ideas you might have , that everyone else is having to live with.
I'm thinking of a relative - PhD in science, started a couple of successful businesses, young family but settled at schools etc. The businesses are starting run themselves....
In times past, he would have been already high up in the local council and looking at Parliament. Now he and those like him wouldn't touch it with barge pole.
1564 deaths today, the highest yet. The urgency of vaccination really cannot be overstated.
Do you think vaccination alone solves this? Or will it require more than just vaccination? Testing testing testing. Wack a mole. Public compliance on measures for years to come?
Is there now too much emphasis on vaccination as magic bullet, in the bigger picture we are losing our way?
I think that vaccination will work provided the effect of it is that those who have had it not only don't get ill but don't pass it on either (which seems still uncertain). If that is the case then herd immunity should stop the virus from finding sufficient vectors in which to spread. Even if 1 is unlucky enough to be infected they will struggle to find others to infect so the trail can die out.
We will need to keep up testing for a while and certainly the isolation of those who do become infected but it seems to me that "magic bullet" is not far off the mark. Of course if it turns out that those vaccinated can passively carry and spread the virus this gets a whole lot more difficult.
It might be the time to recall that Toby Young was admitted with BBB scores. Though which side of the argument that reinforces, I'm not entirely sure.
Ed Miliband had crap A-levels....again difficult to tell which side of argument.
That was David, Ed got better A level grades than his brother
Yes you are right....maybe inadvertently proving points made in this thread, as I think most people regard David as the more capable of the two.
Didn't he get in via some special scheme for kids from poor attaining schools?
David had more charisma, does not mean he was more intelligent than Ed.
I don't know either of them but from their speeches and public persona I would have said that Ed had more raw intelligence, if less charm.
From what I've read David M.'s charm lasts as long as he thinks he needs something from you. That may of course may be a great quality in a leader, or not.
Mr Johnson's going to have to do better than make up moans about the SNP in PMQ and think they are sufficient, esp. when it's folk such as Alistair Carmichael doing the attacking. But hey, they're all Jocks perhaps.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
Actually 3 Bs from someone who's have to overcome a hell of a lot of difficult circumstances and self-motivate completely because there was no-one there to push them is a hell of a lot more valuable than 3 As from someone in a private school with pushy parents and private tutors.
No it isn't, it is still lower grades no matter personal circumstance.
However as a socialist your solution as usual is to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator and penalise the middle classes having already scrapped most grammars which were the best chance to get to Oxbridge the working class ever had
Yes it is, actually. "Socialism" has nothing to do with it. I'm not even a socialist.
We all know you're a grade snob so this is to be expected, but you're wrong.
Besides, I didn't say a BBB was better than an AAA. In fact of course in most cases the AAA will be valuable. However there may be circumstances where the BBB is in fact more valuable.
You are a leftwing Tory hater.
In most cases BBB would normally be barely enough to scrape into Southampton let alone Oxbridge and it would be ridiculous of Oxbridge to lower its grade total so far to admit more from comprehensives.
There may be a case to favour an AAA comp student over an AAA private school student, there is no case to favour a BBB comp student over an AAA private school student
It is entirely conceivable that the BBB pupil is more intelligent and harder working than the AAA one. In that case it is better for Oxford (dunno what this "Oxbridge" shit is) and by any sane standards more just and more desirable that the BBB pupil gets the place, subject to the very important proviso that the BBB pupil can make up the ground lost by worse schooling, in time to benefit from the Oxford course.
A friend of mine studied some Classics degree at Oxford, maybe the one Boris studied? In any case she was from a state school and found it almost impossible to keep up as most of her peers had studied greek and latin at their private schools, whilst she had not.
She got a 1st anyway.
In that case, your friend will almost certainly have scored very highly in the Classics Language Aptitude Test (CLAT) when she applied, and thus was admitted on merit, not as a charity case. Oxford has been doing this for years, and it's a much better solution than some crude handicapping system.
On the other hand, it's a great pity if she wasn't able to acquire the languages to a comfortable level, since that's one of the main pleasures and joys of the course.
I didn't say she was a "charity case". She is one of the most intelligent people I've ever met. My point was to highlight yet another advantage those who go to private school have and how she had to work much harder to achieve that 1st than they probably did.
I'm not disagreeing with you entirely. Getting a First if you read for Course II (where you start the languages from scratch) is less common, and the people who manage it are indeed impressive. On the other hand, the scope of Course II is narrower relative to Course I, concentrating on one language rather than both, and the first year is largely dedicated to intensive catch-up work, so inevitably the average Course II candidate will simply have read and covered less by the end of the degree.
Still, it helps Classics to survive and be enjoyed by more people, so it's not all bad.
Latin was both my best and favourite subject at school. Touch of the Billy Elliots about it except unlike him I caved in and went STEM instead. Others spoke, authority figures, and I did it their way. Regrets, I have sixty two, and this is one of them.
I knew you were basically sound, kinabalu. Oddly enough, I started off school certain that I was going to become a scientist, and only did my volte-face to languages and humanities a little later, though not from any special pressure.
I really hope that, for once, Mr Ed's hunch is correct and Trump is not impeached.
The GOP are screwed if Trump is able to stand in 2024. They won't be able to win with him and they won't be able to win without him.
The moment he enters the primaries there will civil war in the GOP. Half the party have seen the light, the other half are doubling down and on their knees quivering in fear at the QAnon types.
The only way I see out of this for the GOP is for Trump to be disbarred from elective office. That way he can't even stand as an independent if he loses the GOP nomination. None of the mini-Trump wannabes would have anything like the same pulling power. I think that is why the saner wing will seriously
(For some reason I was unable to respond directly to Mr Ed. Kept getting a message saying my comment was "1 character too short")
According to the BBC the vote on the second impeachment will be around 8.00pm tonight, our time. I suspect that will slip a bit but it seems very likely to be passed and the only question is how many Republicans support it.
In the last half hour, money has returned for Trump to leave office before the end of his term next week, though he is still long odds-on to tough it out. Yes 7.8 No 1.14
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
Actually 3 Bs from someone who's have to overcome a hell of a lot of difficult circumstances and self-motivate completely because there was no-one there to push them is a hell of a lot more valuable than 3 As from someone in a private school with pushy parents and private tutors.
No it isn't, it is still lower grades no matter personal circumstance.
However as a socialist your solution as usual is to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator and penalise the middle classes having already scrapped most grammars which were the best chance to get to Oxbridge the working class ever had
Yes it is, actually. "Socialism" has nothing to do with it. I'm not even a socialist.
We all know you're a grade snob so this is to be expected, but you're wrong.
Besides, I didn't say a BBB was better than an AAA. In fact of course in most cases the AAA will be valuable. However there may be circumstances where the BBB is in fact more valuable.
You are a leftwing Tory hater.
In most cases BBB would normally be barely enough to scrape into Southampton let alone Oxbridge and it would be ridiculous of Oxbridge to lower its grade total so far to admit more from comprehensives.
There may be a case to favour an AAA comp student over an AAA private school student, there is no case to favour a BBB comp student over an AAA private school student
It is entirely conceivable that the BBB pupil is more intelligent and harder working than the AAA one. In that case it is better for Oxford (dunno what this "Oxbridge" shit is) and by any sane standards more just and more desirable that the BBB pupil gets the place, subject to the very important proviso that the BBB pupil can make up the ground lost by worse schooling, in time to benefit from the Oxford course.
A friend of mine studied some Classics degree at Oxford, maybe the one Boris studied? In any case she was from a state school and found it almost impossible to keep up as most of her peers had studied greek and latin at their private schools, whilst she had not.
She got a 1st anyway.
In that case, your friend will almost certainly have scored very highly in the Classics Language Aptitude Test (CLAT) when she applied, and thus was admitted on merit, not as a charity case. Oxford has been doing this for years, and it's a much better solution than some crude handicapping system.
On the other hand, it's a great pity if she wasn't able to acquire the languages to a comfortable level, since that's one of the main pleasures and joys of the course.
I didn't say she was a "charity case". She is one of the most intelligent people I've ever met. My point was to highlight yet another advantage those who go to private school have and how she had to work much harder to achieve that 1st than they probably did.
I'm not disagreeing with you entirely. Getting a First if you read for Course II (where you start the languages from scratch) is less common, and the people who manage it are indeed impressive. On the other hand, the scope of Course II is narrower relative to Course I, concentrating on one language rather than both, and the first year is largely dedicated to intensive catch-up work, so inevitably the average Course II candidate will simply have read and covered less by the end of the degree.
Still, it helps Classics to survive and be enjoyed by more people, so it's not all bad.
Latin was both my best and favourite subject at school. Touch of the Billy Elliots about it except unlike him I caved in and went STEM instead. Others spoke, authority figures, and I did it their way. Regrets, I have sixty two, and this is one of them.
I knew you were basically sound, kinabalu. Oddly enough, I started off school certain that I was going to become a scientist, and only did my volte-face to languages and humanities a little later, though not from any special pressure.
I think a big mistake many arts graduates make is to assume that science grads are completely illiterate in the arts whereas science grads also know how to get to Covent Garden, or Bayreuth for that matter, read voraciously, and can tell a Monet from a Manet.
Surely Geography graduates are best at knowing how to get to Covent Garden or Bayreuth?
New cases now trending down - and given the number of tests, positivity rate too - admissions & deaths still a horror show:
Going to be that way for a long time to come. You can't have days and days of 60k cases and not end up with lots of deaths.
Deaths might get up to 2.5k per day at the peak.
Don't think so. We are currently seeing a lot of backfilling (Christmas/NY deaths now being reported. No date of death is over 800 yet. Cases thankfully starting to fall (still very high) and yes that means deaths are baked in, but things should be moving in the right direction now.
I really hope you are right about that. I must say that in mid December I was expecting us to be well over 1k a day by now and over 100k total by the end of the month. It would be great if it turned out to be less.
"I think it is more the smart ones don't go into politics, just the dregs".
There is some truth in that. I went to a well-known public school - not Eton, thank god - and there are a couple of people I remember who've done well in academia, the arts, etc and elsewhere. One of the people who was considered hugely unremarkable and conventional has become an MP. As mentioned, politics just isn't appealing to many more well-rounded or particularly interesting people any more.
The point about entitlement raised below is also relevant, though. If you're unremarkable but entitled, both in terms of your opportunities, routes to power and attitude, it's more likely to be your own prejudices, rather than any particularly interesting or independent ideas you might have , that everyone else is having to live with.
I'm thinking of a relative - PhD in science, started a couple of successful businesses, young family but settled at schools etc. The businesses are starting run themselves....
In times past, he would have been already high up in the local council and looking at Parliament. Now he and those like him wouldn't touch it with barge pole.
Hardly surprising, given the opprobrium meted out to politicians nowadays, and made personal by social media.
On a different note, there's one looming political crisis which I don't think has had enough attention. We're hearing a lot, as expected, about the disruption to GB-EU trade, which is starting to be really bad, and to GB-NI trade, which is heading for catastrophic. What we're not hearing much about in the UK media, as yet, is the knock-on effect on the Republic of Ireland, which is inevitably also going to be very badly hit since their economy, supply chains, and food supplies are so closely integrated with NI's. This is going to be another EU crisis before long.
My father remembered the V1 "doodlebugs" well and said everyone soon learnt to ignore them if the engine was running but to take cover as soon as it cut out! Of course with the V2 you got no warning at all.
Corroborated by my dad and the rest of y older family. It was quite popular joke in the seventies "we didn't worry if we heard a doodlebug..."
I really hope that, for once, Mr Ed's hunch is correct and Trump is not impeached.
The GOP are screwed if Trump is able to stand in 2024. They won't be able to win with him and they won't be able to win without him.
The moment he enters the primaries there will civil war in the GOP. Half the party have seen the light, the other half are doubling down and on their knees quivering in fear at the QAnon types.
The only way I see out of this for the GOP is for Trump to be disbarred from elective office. That way he can't even stand as an independent if he loses the GOP nomination. None of the mini-Trump wannabes would have anything like the same pulling power. I think that is why the saner wing will seriously
(For some reason I was unable to respond directly to Mr Ed. Kept getting a message saying my comment was "1 character too short")
According to the BBC the vote on the second impeachment will be around 8.00pm tonight, our time. I suspect that will slip a bit but it seems very likely to be passed and the only question is how many Republicans support it.
In the last half hour, money has returned for Trump to leave office before the end of his term next week, though he is still long odds-on to tough it out. Yes 7.8 No 1.14
It is worth recalling that there has been substantial inflation in degrees.
Roughly speaking, 30 per cent of students get a first. And ~ 50 per cent of students get a 2.1.
So, Boris Johnson's degree is pretty average.
In fact -- given his enormous educational advantages -- it is clear that Boris is a lazy fat fucker.
At Oxford, students are brighter and/or grade inflation higher so 95 per cent get a first or upper second.
I think it is more that at Oxford & Cambridge, having let you in the first place, they don't want to admit they made a mistake. 😁
So 2.2s are quite rare -- and it takes quite extraordinary ability to get a 3rd.
This has changed massively.
An academic, not long ago calculated the point in the future where no-one at a UK university would get less than a 1st - no seconds, no thirds, no fails.
But I can't work out if that's because they are going to vote Yes, vote No or simply because they don't want to say anything on tape.
I think the last - they simply don't want to be associated with Trump, and also don't want to be associated with speaking against him. So better to avoid any association of any kind publicly.
It is worth recalling that there has been substantial inflation in degrees.
Roughly speaking, 30 per cent of students get a first. And ~ 50 per cent of students get a 2.1.
So, Boris Johnson's degree is pretty average.
In fact -- given his enormous educational advantages -- it is clear that Boris is a lazy fat fucker.
At Oxford, students are brighter and/or grade inflation higher so 95 per cent get a first or upper second.
I think it is more that at Oxford & Cambridge, having let you in the first place, they don't want to admit they made a mistake. 😁
So 2.2s are quite rare -- and it takes quite extraordinary ability to get a 3rd.
This has changed massively.
An academic, not long ago calculated the point in the future where no-one at a UK university would get less than a 1st - no seconds, no thirds, no fails.
Many of us will live to see it, IIRC.
Thankfully the number of Top Firsts remains at one per year per subject, so at least something isn't devalued.
"I think it is more the smart ones don't go into politics, just the dregs".
There is some truth in that. I went to a well-known public school - not Eton, thank god - and there are a couple of people I remember who've done well in academia, the arts, etc and elsewhere. One of the people who was considered hugely unremarkable and conventional has become an MP. As mentioned, politics just isn't appealing to many more well-rounded or particularly interesting people any more.
The point about entitlement raised below is also relevant, though. If you're unremarkable but entitled, both in terms of your opportunities, routes to power and attitude, it's more likely to be your own prejudices, rather than any particularly interesting or independent ideas you might have , that everyone else is having to live with.
I'm thinking of a relative - PhD in science, started a couple of successful businesses, young family but settled at schools etc. The businesses are starting run themselves....
In times past, he would have been already high up in the local council and looking at Parliament. Now he and those like him wouldn't touch it with barge pole.
Possibly true, but you can't tell from that graph. It could be that more patients are dying or being discharged per day!
The graph shows the the number of Covid patients in London is still increasing by about 3% per day. So either people are being admitted in greater numbers, people are not dying or being discharge, or a LOT of babies are being born with Covid.
"I think it is more the smart ones don't go into politics, just the dregs".
There is some truth in that. I went to a well-known public school - not Eton, thank god - and there are a couple of people I remember who've done well in academia, the arts, etc and elsewhere. One of the people who was considered hugely unremarkable and conventional has become an MP. As mentioned, politics just isn't appealing to many more well-rounded or particularly interesting people any more.
The point about entitlement raised below is also relevant, though. If you're unremarkable but entitled, both in terms of your opportunities, routes to power and attitude, it's more likely to be your own prejudices, rather than any particularly interesting or independent ideas you might have , that everyone else is having to live with.
I think that has always been largely the case.
If you are a top commercial barrister paid a fortune or a brain surgeon or a ceo or a top professor why would you take the pay cut with the added public intrusion to become an MP? There are a few exceptions like Archie Norman but they soon move on.
Plus party politics requires you to toe the party line inevitably and if you are too independent thinking you will not last too long with the whips nor rise up the greasy pole
It is worth recalling that there has been substantial inflation in degrees.
Roughly speaking, 30 per cent of students get a first. And ~ 50 per cent of students get a 2.1.
So, Boris Johnson's degree is pretty average.
In fact -- given his enormous educational advantages -- it is clear that Boris is a lazy fat fucker.
At Oxford, students are brighter and/or grade inflation higher so 95 per cent get a first or upper second.
I think it is more that at Oxford & Cambridge, having let you in the first place, they don't want to admit they made a mistake. 😁
So 2.2s are quite rare -- and it takes quite extraordinary ability to get a 3rd.
This has changed massively.
An academic, not long ago calculated the point in the future where no-one at a UK university would get less than a 1st - no seconds, no thirds, no fails.
Many of us will live to see it, IIRC.
Thankfully the number of Top Firsts remains at one per year per subject, so at least something isn't devalued.
--AS
Following on from the concept of A* and A** - in 2050, we bring you!
The Firstly First Extra First You Betcha You Were First
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
Actually 3 Bs from someone who's have to overcome a hell of a lot of difficult circumstances and self-motivate completely because there was no-one there to push them is a hell of a lot more valuable than 3 As from someone in a private school with pushy parents and private tutors.
No it isn't, it is still lower grades no matter personal circumstance.
However as a socialist your solution as usual is to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator and penalise the middle classes having already scrapped most grammars which were the best chance to get to Oxbridge the working class ever had
Yes it is, actually. "Socialism" has nothing to do with it. I'm not even a socialist.
We all know you're a grade snob so this is to be expected, but you're wrong.
Besides, I didn't say a BBB was better than an AAA. In fact of course in most cases the AAA will be valuable. However there may be circumstances where the BBB is in fact more valuable.
You are a leftwing Tory hater.
In most cases BBB would normally be barely enough to scrape into Southampton let alone Oxbridge and it would be ridiculous of Oxbridge to lower its grade total so far to admit more from comprehensives.
There may be a case to favour an AAA comp student over an AAA private school student, there is no case to favour a BBB comp student over an AAA private school student
It is entirely conceivable that the BBB pupil is more intelligent and harder working than the AAA one. In that case it is better for Oxford (dunno what this "Oxbridge" shit is) and by any sane standards more just and more desirable that the BBB pupil gets the place, subject to the very important proviso that the BBB pupil can make up the ground lost by worse schooling, in time to benefit from the Oxford course.
A friend of mine studied some Classics degree at Oxford, maybe the one Boris studied? In any case she was from a state school and found it almost impossible to keep up as most of her peers had studied greek and latin at their private schools, whilst she had not.
She got a 1st anyway.
In that case, your friend will almost certainly have scored very highly in the Classics Language Aptitude Test (CLAT) when she applied, and thus was admitted on merit, not as a charity case. Oxford has been doing this for years, and it's a much better solution than some crude handicapping system.
On the other hand, it's a great pity if she wasn't able to acquire the languages to a comfortable level, since that's one of the main pleasures and joys of the course.
I didn't say she was a "charity case". She is one of the most intelligent people I've ever met. My point was to highlight yet another advantage those who go to private school have and how she had to work much harder to achieve that 1st than they probably did.
I'm not disagreeing with you entirely. Getting a First if you read for Course II (where you start the languages from scratch) is less common, and the people who manage it are indeed impressive. On the other hand, the scope of Course II is narrower relative to Course I, concentrating on one language rather than both, and the first year is largely dedicated to intensive catch-up work, so inevitably the average Course II candidate will simply have read and covered less by the end of the degree.
Still, it helps Classics to survive and be enjoyed by more people, so it's not all bad.
Latin was both my best and favourite subject at school. Touch of the Billy Elliots about it except unlike him I caved in and went STEM instead. Others spoke, authority figures, and I did it their way. Regrets, I have sixty two, and this is one of them.
I knew you were basically sound, kinabalu. Oddly enough, I started off school certain that I was going to become a scientist, and only did my volte-face to languages and humanities a little later, though not from any special pressure.
I think a big mistake many arts graduates make is to assume that science grads are completely illiterate in the arts whereas science grads also know how to get to Covent Garden, or Bayreuth for that matter, read voraciously, and can tell a Monet from a Manet.
A STEM bod is more likely to be good at the Arts than an Arts bod is to be good at STEM. So if you had to cull one group - I mean if you simply had to - and start again from there you'd probably, albeit with the heaviest of hearts, have to say farewell to the Arts crowd.
Mr Johnson's going to have to do better than make up moans about the SNP in PMQ and think they are sufficient, esp. when it's folk such as Alistair Carmichael doing the attacking. But hey, they're all Jocks perhaps.
It is worth recalling that there has been substantial inflation in degrees.
Roughly speaking, 30 per cent of students get a first. And ~ 50 per cent of students get a 2.1.
So, Boris Johnson's degree is pretty average.
In fact -- given his enormous educational advantages -- it is clear that Boris is a lazy fat fucker.
At Oxford, students are brighter and/or grade inflation higher so 95 per cent get a first or upper second.
I think it is more that at Oxford & Cambridge, having let you in the first place, they don't want to admit they made a mistake. 😁
So 2.2s are quite rare -- and it takes quite extraordinary ability to get a 3rd.
This has changed massively.
An academic, not long ago calculated the point in the future where no-one at a UK university would get less than a 1st - no seconds, no thirds, no fails.
Many of us will live to see it, IIRC.
It is of course another consequence of whopping tuition fees -- I have paid the money, I want what I paid for.
"I think it is more the smart ones don't go into politics, just the dregs".
There is some truth in that. I went to a well-known public school - not Eton, thank god - and there are a couple of people I remember who've done well in academia, the arts, etc and elsewhere. One of the people who was considered hugely unremarkable and conventional has become an MP. As mentioned, politics just isn't appealing to many more well-rounded or particularly interesting people any more.
The point about entitlement raised below is also relevant, though. If you're unremarkable but entitled, both in terms of your opportunities, routes to power and attitude, it's more likely to be your own prejudices, rather than any particularly interesting or independent ideas you might have , that everyone else is having to live with.
I think that has always been largely the case.
If you are a top commercial barrister paid a fortune or a brain surgeon or a ceo or a top professor why would you take the pay cut with the added public intrusion to become an MP? There are a few exceptions like Archie Norman but they soon move on.
Plus party politics requires you to toe the party line inevitably and if you are too independent thinking you will not last too long with the whips nor rise up the greasy pole
Possibly true, but you can't tell from that graph. It could be that more patients are dying or being discharged per day!
The graph shows the the number of Covid patients in London is still increasing by about 3% per day. So either people are being admitted in greater numbers, people are not dying or being discharge, or a LOT of babies are being born with Covid.
It's probably rising admissions.
Well, no. The rate at which the number of people in hospital is increasing has fallen, which means that a) fewer people are being admitted per day than previously or b) more people are leaving (dying or being discharged per day) or c) some combination of the two.
Imagine a tank of water. If the rate at which it is rising has slowed (but is still positive), then the flow rate into the tank must have fallen (assuming no outflow).
"I think it is more the smart ones don't go into politics, just the dregs".
There is some truth in that. I went to a well-known public school - not Eton, thank god - and there are a couple of people I remember who've done well in academia, the arts, etc and elsewhere. One of the people who was considered hugely unremarkable and conventional has become an MP. As mentioned, politics just isn't appealing to many more well-rounded or particularly interesting people any more.
The point about entitlement raised below is also relevant, though. If you're unremarkable but entitled, both in terms of your opportunities, routes to power and attitude, it's more likely to be your own prejudices, rather than any particularly interesting or independent ideas you might have , that everyone else is having to live with.
I'm thinking of a relative - PhD in science, started a couple of successful businesses, young family but settled at schools etc. The businesses are starting run themselves....
In times past, he would have been already high up in the local council and looking at Parliament. Now he and those like him wouldn't touch it with barge pole.
Councils seem to be 'professional' politicians now rather than successful people giving something back.
Something that needs to change. But how, when nobody with any sense would get involved?
"I think it is more the smart ones don't go into politics, just the dregs".
There is some truth in that. I went to a well-known public school - not Eton, thank god - and there are a couple of people I remember who've done well in academia, the arts, etc and elsewhere. One of the people who was considered hugely unremarkable and conventional has become an MP. As mentioned, politics just isn't appealing to many more well-rounded or particularly interesting people any more.
The point about entitlement raised below is also relevant, though. If you're unremarkable but entitled, both in terms of your opportunities, routes to power and attitude, it's more likely to be your own prejudices, rather than any particularly interesting or independent ideas you might have , that everyone else is having to live with.
I'm thinking of a relative - PhD in science, started a couple of successful businesses, young family but settled at schools etc. The businesses are starting run themselves....
In times past, he would have been already high up in the local council and looking at Parliament. Now he and those like him wouldn't touch it with barge pole.
Councils seem to be 'professional' politicians now rather than successful people giving something back.
Something that needs to change. But how, when nobody with any sense would get involved?
Possibly true, but you can't tell from that graph. It could be that more patients are dying or being discharged per day!
Admissions have fallen, so the headline is correct, but they haven't fallen enough for the number in hospital to have also fallen.
The graph is, as you say, not entirely relevant.
Councils are largely formed of professional or semi professional political activists looking for the first steps on the ladder to Parliament or else the retired who have plenty of free time to be a councillor
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
Actually 3 Bs from someone who's have to overcome a hell of a lot of difficult circumstances and self-motivate completely because there was no-one there to push them is a hell of a lot more valuable than 3 As from someone in a private school with pushy parents and private tutors.
No it isn't, it is still lower grades no matter personal circumstance.
However as a socialist your solution as usual is to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator and penalise the middle classes having already scrapped most grammars which were the best chance to get to Oxbridge the working class ever had
Yes it is, actually. "Socialism" has nothing to do with it. I'm not even a socialist.
We all know you're a grade snob so this is to be expected, but you're wrong.
Besides, I didn't say a BBB was better than an AAA. In fact of course in most cases the AAA will be valuable. However there may be circumstances where the BBB is in fact more valuable.
You are a leftwing Tory hater.
In most cases BBB would normally be barely enough to scrape into Southampton let alone Oxbridge and it would be ridiculous of Oxbridge to lower its grade total so far to admit more from comprehensives.
There may be a case to favour an AAA comp student over an AAA private school student, there is no case to favour a BBB comp student over an AAA private school student
It is entirely conceivable that the BBB pupil is more intelligent and harder working than the AAA one. In that case it is better for Oxford (dunno what this "Oxbridge" shit is) and by any sane standards more just and more desirable that the BBB pupil gets the place, subject to the very important proviso that the BBB pupil can make up the ground lost by worse schooling, in time to benefit from the Oxford course.
A friend of mine studied some Classics degree at Oxford, maybe the one Boris studied? In any case she was from a state school and found it almost impossible to keep up as most of her peers had studied greek and latin at their private schools, whilst she had not.
She got a 1st anyway.
In that case, your friend will almost certainly have scored very highly in the Classics Language Aptitude Test (CLAT) when she applied, and thus was admitted on merit, not as a charity case. Oxford has been doing this for years, and it's a much better solution than some crude handicapping system.
On the other hand, it's a great pity if she wasn't able to acquire the languages to a comfortable level, since that's one of the main pleasures and joys of the course.
I didn't say she was a "charity case". She is one of the most intelligent people I've ever met. My point was to highlight yet another advantage those who go to private school have and how she had to work much harder to achieve that 1st than they probably did.
I'm not disagreeing with you entirely. Getting a First if you read for Course II (where you start the languages from scratch) is less common, and the people who manage it are indeed impressive. On the other hand, the scope of Course II is narrower relative to Course I, concentrating on one language rather than both, and the first year is largely dedicated to intensive catch-up work, so inevitably the average Course II candidate will simply have read and covered less by the end of the degree.
Still, it helps Classics to survive and be enjoyed by more people, so it's not all bad.
Latin was both my best and favourite subject at school. Touch of the Billy Elliots about it except unlike him I caved in and went STEM instead. Others spoke, authority figures, and I did it their way. Regrets, I have sixty two, and this is one of them.
I knew you were basically sound, kinabalu. Oddly enough, I started off school certain that I was going to become a scientist, and only did my volte-face to languages and humanities a little later, though not from any special pressure.
I think a big mistake many arts graduates make is to assume that science grads are completely illiterate in the arts whereas science grads also know how to get to Covent Garden, or Bayreuth for that matter, read voraciously, and can tell a Monet from a Manet.
A STEM bod is more likely to be good at the Arts than an Arts bod is to be good at STEM. So if you had to cull one group - I mean if you simply had to - and start again from there, you'd probably, albeit with the heaviest of hearts, have to say farewell to the Arts crowd.
Although I am a scientist by training I hate the political obsession with "STEM" . What a dull place the world would be if we did not encourage youngsters to be musicians, artists, actors, sportsmen/women. We could probably do with a few less journalists with English degrees and anyone who scraped through Oxford with a Classics degree should be bared from any form of high office.
"I think it is more the smart ones don't go into politics, just the dregs".
There is some truth in that. I went to a well-known public school - not Eton, thank god - and there are a couple of people I remember who've done well in academia, the arts, etc and elsewhere. One of the people who was considered hugely unremarkable and conventional has become an MP. As mentioned, politics just isn't appealing to many more well-rounded or particularly interesting people any more.
The point about entitlement raised below is also relevant, though. If you're unremarkable but entitled, both in terms of your opportunities, routes to power and attitude, it's more likely to be your own prejudices, rather than any particularly interesting or independent ideas you might have , that everyone else is having to live with.
I'm thinking of a relative - PhD in science, started a couple of successful businesses, young family but settled at schools etc. The businesses are starting run themselves....
In times past, he would have been already high up in the local council and looking at Parliament. Now he and those like him wouldn't touch it with barge pole.
Could still be a candidate for the Lords though
We both, in jest, noted that before Tony Blair ruined the market for buying peerages with political donations that a seat in the Lords was quite a good pension investment.
"I think it is more the smart ones don't go into politics, just the dregs".
There is some truth in that. I went to a well-known public school - not Eton, thank god - and there are a couple of people I remember who've done well in academia, the arts, etc and elsewhere. One of the people who was considered hugely unremarkable and conventional has become an MP. As mentioned, politics just isn't appealing to many more well-rounded or particularly interesting people any more.
The point about entitlement raised below is also relevant, though. If you're unremarkable but entitled, both in terms of your opportunities, routes to power and attitude, it's more likely to be your own prejudices, rather than any particularly interesting or independent ideas you might have , that everyone else is having to live with.
I think that has always been largely the case.
If you are a top commercial barrister paid a fortune or a brain surgeon or a ceo or a top professor why would you take the pay cut with the added public intrusion to become an MP? There are a few exceptions like Archie Norman but they soon move on.
Plus party politics requires you to toe the party line inevitably and if you are too independent thinking you will not last too long with the whips nor rise up the greasy pole
Counterpoints: Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn
Are you suggesting Boris and Corbyn are geniuses of humanity then? Boris and Corbyn at least knew how to stir up and delight the party base even if not always the party leadership.
That was what got them to the leadership themselves
If they go to the country it'll end up as a coalition of the right headed by Salvini. Yes, Lega has been dropping support. But that support has been going to Fratelli d'Italia.
Delurk. Long time reader, grateful for the many excellent contributions. From a don's perspective, I'd say the Oxbridge info might need a bit of tutorial work...
"I think it is more the smart ones don't go into politics, just the dregs".
There is some truth in that. I went to a well-known public school - not Eton, thank god - and there are a couple of people I remember who've done well in academia, the arts, etc and elsewhere. One of the people who was considered hugely unremarkable and conventional has become an MP. As mentioned, politics just isn't appealing to many more well-rounded or particularly interesting people any more.
The point about entitlement raised below is also relevant, though. If you're unremarkable but entitled, both in terms of your opportunities, routes to power and attitude, it's more likely to be your own prejudices, rather than any particularly interesting or independent ideas you might have , that everyone else is having to live with.
I think that has always been largely the case.
If you are a top commercial barrister paid a fortune or a brain surgeon or a ceo or a top professor why would you take the pay cut with the added public intrusion to become an MP? There are a few exceptions like Archie Norman but they soon move on.
Plus party politics requires you to toe the party line inevitably and if you are too independent thinking you will not last too long with the whips nor rise up the greasy pole
Counterpoints: Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn
Are you suggesting Boris and Corbyn are geniuses of humanity then?
No, I'm suggesting they made it to the tops of their respective greasy poles without having to "toe the party line inevitably".
It might be the time to recall that Toby Young was admitted with BBB scores. Though which side of the argument that reinforces, I'm not entirely sure.
Ed Miliband had crap A-levels....again difficult to tell which side of argument.
That was David, Ed got better A level grades than his brother
Yes you are right....maybe inadvertently proving points made in this thread, as I think most people regard David as the more capable of the two.
Didn't he get in via some special scheme for kids from poor attaining schools?
David had more charisma, does not mean he was more intelligent than Ed.
I don't know either of them but from their speeches and public persona I would have said that Ed had more raw intelligence, if less charm.
From what I've read David M.'s charm lasts as long as he thinks he needs something from you. That may of course may be a great quality in a leader, or not.
You may well be right Divvie, he is a politician after all, even if not a very successful one.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
Actually 3 Bs from someone who's have to overcome a hell of a lot of difficult circumstances and self-motivate completely because there was no-one there to push them is a hell of a lot more valuable than 3 As from someone in a private school with pushy parents and private tutors.
No it isn't, it is still lower grades no matter personal circumstance.
However as a socialist your solution as usual is to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator and penalise the middle classes having already scrapped most grammars which were the best chance to get to Oxbridge the working class ever had
Yes it is, actually. "Socialism" has nothing to do with it. I'm not even a socialist.
We all know you're a grade snob so this is to be expected, but you're wrong.
Besides, I didn't say a BBB was better than an AAA. In fact of course in most cases the AAA will be valuable. However there may be circumstances where the BBB is in fact more valuable.
You are a leftwing Tory hater.
In most cases BBB would normally be barely enough to scrape into Southampton let alone Oxbridge and it would be ridiculous of Oxbridge to lower its grade total so far to admit more from comprehensives.
There may be a case to favour an AAA comp student over an AAA private school student, there is no case to favour a BBB comp student over an AAA private school student
It is entirely conceivable that the BBB pupil is more intelligent and harder working than the AAA one. In that case it is better for Oxford (dunno what this "Oxbridge" shit is) and by any sane standards more just and more desirable that the BBB pupil gets the place, subject to the very important proviso that the BBB pupil can make up the ground lost by worse schooling, in time to benefit from the Oxford course.
A friend of mine studied some Classics degree at Oxford, maybe the one Boris studied? In any case she was from a state school and found it almost impossible to keep up as most of her peers had studied greek and latin at their private schools, whilst she had not.
She got a 1st anyway.
In that case, your friend will almost certainly have scored very highly in the Classics Language Aptitude Test (CLAT) when she applied, and thus was admitted on merit, not as a charity case. Oxford has been doing this for years, and it's a much better solution than some crude handicapping system.
On the other hand, it's a great pity if she wasn't able to acquire the languages to a comfortable level, since that's one of the main pleasures and joys of the course.
I didn't say she was a "charity case". She is one of the most intelligent people I've ever met. My point was to highlight yet another advantage those who go to private school have and how she had to work much harder to achieve that 1st than they probably did.
I'm not disagreeing with you entirely. Getting a First if you read for Course II (where you start the languages from scratch) is less common, and the people who manage it are indeed impressive. On the other hand, the scope of Course II is narrower relative to Course I, concentrating on one language rather than both, and the first year is largely dedicated to intensive catch-up work, so inevitably the average Course II candidate will simply have read and covered less by the end of the degree.
Still, it helps Classics to survive and be enjoyed by more people, so it's not all bad.
Latin was both my best and favourite subject at school. Touch of the Billy Elliots about it except unlike him I caved in and went STEM instead. Others spoke, authority figures, and I did it their way. Regrets, I have sixty two, and this is one of them.
I knew you were basically sound, kinabalu. Oddly enough, I started off school certain that I was going to become a scientist, and only did my volte-face to languages and humanities a little later, though not from any special pressure.
I think a big mistake many arts graduates make is to assume that science grads are completely illiterate in the arts whereas science grads also know how to get to Covent Garden, or Bayreuth for that matter, read voraciously, and can tell a Monet from a Manet.
A STEM bod is more likely to be good at the Arts than an Arts bod is to be good at STEM. So if you had to cull one group - I mean if you simply had to - and start again from there you'd probably, albeit with the heaviest of hearts, have to say farewell to the Arts crowd.
Delurk. Long time reader, grateful for the many excellent contributions. From a don's perspective, I'd say the Oxbridge info might need a bit of tutorial work...
"I think it is more the smart ones don't go into politics, just the dregs".
There is some truth in that. I went to a well-known public school - not Eton, thank god - and there are a couple of people I remember who've done well in academia, the arts, etc and elsewhere. One of the people who was considered hugely unremarkable and conventional has become an MP. As mentioned, politics just isn't appealing to many more well-rounded or particularly interesting people any more.
The point about entitlement raised below is also relevant, though. If you're unremarkable but entitled, both in terms of your opportunities, routes to power and attitude, it's more likely to be your own prejudices, rather than any particularly interesting or independent ideas you might have , that everyone else is having to live with.
I'm thinking of a relative - PhD in science, started a couple of successful businesses, young family but settled at schools etc. The businesses are starting run themselves....
In times past, he would have been already high up in the local council and looking at Parliament. Now he and those like him wouldn't touch it with barge pole.
Councils seem to be 'professional' politicians now rather than successful people giving something back.
Something that needs to change. But how, when nobody with any sense would get involved?
Possibly true, but you can't tell from that graph. It could be that more patients are dying or being discharged per day!
Admissions have fallen, so the headline is correct, but they haven't fallen enough for the number in hospital to have also fallen.
The graph is, as you say, not entirely relevant.
Councils are largely formed of professional or semi professional political activists looking for the first steps on the ladder to Parliament or else the retired who have plenty of free time to be a councillor
You are talking about your fellow Conservatives, of course, young HY.
"I think it is more the smart ones don't go into politics, just the dregs".
There is some truth in that. I went to a well-known public school - not Eton, thank god - and there are a couple of people I remember who've done well in academia, the arts, etc and elsewhere. One of the people who was considered hugely unremarkable and conventional has become an MP. As mentioned, politics just isn't appealing to many more well-rounded or particularly interesting people any more.
The point about entitlement raised below is also relevant, though. If you're unremarkable but entitled, both in terms of your opportunities, routes to power and attitude, it's more likely to be your own prejudices, rather than any particularly interesting or independent ideas you might have , that everyone else is having to live with.
I think that has always been largely the case.
If you are a top commercial barrister paid a fortune or a brain surgeon or a ceo or a top professor why would you take the pay cut with the added public intrusion to become an MP? There are a few exceptions like Archie Norman but they soon move on.
Plus party politics requires you to toe the party line inevitably and if you are too independent thinking you will not last too long with the whips nor rise up the greasy pole
Counterpoints: Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn
Are you suggesting Boris and Corbyn are geniuses of humanity then?
No, I'm suggesting they made it to the tops of their respective greasy poles without having to "toe the party line inevitably".
Suggests the greasy pole isn't that greasy when you realise these two incompetents got to the top of it. A very sad indictment of where our political system has stooped to
"I think it is more the smart ones don't go into politics, just the dregs".
There is some truth in that. I went to a well-known public school - not Eton, thank god - and there are a couple of people I remember who've done well in academia, the arts, etc and elsewhere. One of the people who was considered hugely unremarkable and conventional has become an MP. As mentioned, politics just isn't appealing to many more well-rounded or particularly interesting people any more.
The point about entitlement raised below is also relevant, though. If you're unremarkable but entitled, both in terms of your opportunities, routes to power and attitude, it's more likely to be your own prejudices, rather than any particularly interesting or independent ideas you might have , that everyone else is having to live with.
I think that has always been largely the case.
If you are a top commercial barrister paid a fortune or a brain surgeon or a ceo or a top professor why would you take the pay cut with the added public intrusion to become an MP? There are a few exceptions like Archie Norman but they soon move on.
Plus party politics requires you to toe the party line inevitably and if you are too independent thinking you will not last too long with the whips nor rise up the greasy pole
Agreed, but also, as other people have mentioned in the past, I think another difference is the collapse of faith in big ideas. Previously that would offset all the boredom, invasion of your privacy and obedience of being an MP. A bright upper-middle-class boy like Clement Attlee went into Labour politics because he thought there were huge, momentous battles of ideas to be won that would also materially change people's lives, for instance. There are still huge new ideas out there to be discovered, intellectually fought over and materially change people's lives, but we still don't quite know what they are yet.
A cynic would wonder whether the government is deliberately luring people off tax credits on to UC in order to qualify for these covid-related funds.
Once you have come off tax credits it is impossible to go back and UC is worse than tax credits in some ways - the most important being that it is means tested against wealth. So if you have over £16k in savings you don`t qualify for a penny. If you have between £6k and £16k you only partially qualify.
Many people do not realise this and come off tax credits only to sorely regret this decision.
So we have gone from 1,000 poorly organised police officers to 20k fully equipped troops and soldiers sleeping in the Capitol for the first time since the Civil War. There has to be an argument that that bet that Trump would leave before his period of office is up is a winner. He's certainly not making the decisions anymore.
Delurk. Long time reader, grateful for the many excellent contributions. From a don's perspective, I'd say the Oxbridge info might need a bit of tutorial work...
Comments
But I can't work out if that's because they are going to vote Yes, vote No or simply because they don't want to say anything on tape.
So, most likely, the whole thing was a mad rush to get something together. That might explain the shambles, but doesn't excuse the shoddiness. The lack of someone internal saying "This isn't on."
Vouchers or cash remain a much better solution, though.
Ronnie O'Sullivan is playing snooker on BBC2.
Debate now moves to the actual impeachment motion.
If we can provide first jabs to key tiers within the 12 weeks, then they can have their second jabs without taking the place of equally vulnerable people.
The pressure is on.
https://twitter.com/cricketwyvern/status/1349356902237564928
As well as the classic 'punishing someone is divisive' and 'he's not calling for a mob to march on Congress at this very instant' schools of defence.
If the president is calling for calm, why would a debate in a legislature about him lead to violence?
In times past, he would have been already high up in the local council and looking at Parliament. Now he and those like him wouldn't touch it with barge pole.
We will need to keep up testing for a while and certainly the isolation of those who do become infected but it seems to me that "magic bullet" is not far off the mark. Of course if it turns out that those vaccinated can passively carry and spread the virus this gets a whole lot more difficult.
https://twitter.com/EveningExpress/status/1349385856386166785?s=20
https://twitter.com/JohnRentoul/status/1349391353311068160
Nice nativity though.
https://twitter.com/VictoriaPrentis/status/1342208753601564674
Good at everything apart from metalwork, that was my problem, so I should have just done what I liked the most. Ah well.
But still, which course, which uni, doesn't matter - I'd swap it all for really good hair.
Yes 7.8
No 1.14
So 2.2s are quite rare -- and it takes quite extraordinary ability to get a 3rd.
--AS
An academic, not long ago calculated the point in the future where no-one at a UK university would get less than a 1st - no seconds, no thirds, no fails.
Many of us will live to see it, IIRC.
Guido really is the pits.
--AS
So either people are being admitted in greater numbers, people are not dying or being discharge, or a LOT of babies are being born with Covid.
It's probably rising admissions.
If you are a top commercial barrister paid a fortune or a brain surgeon or a ceo or a top professor why would you take the pay cut with the added public intrusion to become an MP? There are a few exceptions like Archie Norman but they soon move on.
Plus party politics requires you to toe the party line inevitably and if you are too independent thinking you will not last too long with the whips nor rise up the greasy pole
The Firstly First Extra First You Betcha You Were First
Only awarded to the first 50% of graduates!
Fishermen
Fishermens' associations
Fish merchants
Fish exporters
Shellfish exporters
The P&J
The Evening Express
Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn
Imagine a tank of water. If the rate at which it is rising has slowed (but is still positive), then the flow rate into the tank must have fallen (assuming no outflow).
I feel sorry for Darren Jones MP, who tried to ask a question.
I'm tried to work out what The PM has just said, but gave up.
Something that needs to change. But how, when nobody with any sense would get involved? Admissions have fallen, so the headline is correct, but they haven't fallen enough for the number in hospital to have fallen as well.
The graph is, as you say, not entirely relevant.
https://twitter.com/EuropeElects/status/1349407214478483457?s=20
And if they are too scared to vote they damn well should resign.
That was what got them to the leadership themselves
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/533932-i-saw-my-life-flash-before-my-eyes-an-oral-history-of-the-capitol-attack
...By 3:03 p.m., rioters had breached the Senate floor. In the secure location, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) spoke with Pence.
“I’ve known Mike Pence forever. I’ve never seen Pence as angry as he was today,” Inhofe recounted to the Tulsa World.
“After all the things I’ve done for [Trump],” Pence said, according to Inhofe....
This isn't "funny" unless you're a psycho. Which you are, of course.
Made men. Wiseguys.
When would Senate vote?
A cynic would wonder whether the government is deliberately luring people off tax credits on to UC in order to qualify for these covid-related funds.
Once you have come off tax credits it is impossible to go back and UC is worse than tax credits in some ways - the most important being that it is means tested against wealth. So if you have over £16k in savings you don`t qualify for a penny. If you have between £6k and £16k you only partially qualify.
Many people do not realise this and come off tax credits only to sorely regret this decision.