To think that universities giving out unconditionals/nominal offers to everyone just devalues even going or having a degree

[Saygoodday]

DS is applying this year. He’s applied to and got offers from a mixture: 2 RG’s, 2 that require BBC and one post 1992 university that has given him an unconditional offer. Obviously not everyone can be ultra academic and there is a place for vocational qualifications and courses with lower entry requirements within the university system, this is not a case of snobbery or advocating that all universities should require four As. However, Lincoln this year has seemingly given out unconditional offers to literally anyone who has applied, I recently saw another university that would make offers for LLB (hons) Law for 64 UCAS points, etc. Lincoln in particular, it’s about an hour from me, has become a favourite for kids who’ve done no work for their a levels who know they will still get into uni. It’s not just Lincoln there are a big number who will take students basically with any results. To me it doesn’t feel at all fair that those who’ve done no work should get the same qualifications as someone who gets A’s. It feels like it just devalues the whole idea of going to university and getting a degree if you can just get one despite being on for terrible grades in your a-levels. Aibu?

Less funnelling than trying to take the credit for the more positive outcomes. Even though they probably got somewhere despite, rather than because of, their undergrad education.

There are benchmarks that should mean the standard is maintained across institutions. The problem is that the external examination system is not fit for purpose in any way. External exams would not help - it would actually remove the specialist expert teaching elements in the upper years.

Good A levels absolutely do not mean someone will actually do well at university. I have seen many very high achiever A level students absolutely fail at uni. Also you see many who struggled in the A level years for various reasons really fly on the right degree.
If someone has worked hard at uni and comes out with a decent degree and the right experience they will get the job over someone who hasn't done so well at university. As an employer that's what we look for and actually the university name currently counts for very little!
Don't be snobby look at what is the best option for the person and career plans.

I’m surprised about the anecdote from UWS, I’m not a nursing lecturer but from what I understand there is an NMC requirement of x hours of theory teaching and universities have to demonstrate 100% attendance for nursing courses, so either a literal 100% attendance rate or if they have missed a session for a genuine reason the university need a system in place where they ensure the student has demonstrated how they’ve made that missed session up. As far as I’m aware the NMC do inspect universities on this.

Also in my experience mitigating circumstances panels are quite strict and students get their applications turned down. Generally a self cert sick note for 7 days would not be accepted.

Agree. In Scotland, the Scottish Government controls nursing places at University therefore the University is required to recruit the target numbers - this in unlike other courses where the Scottish Funding Council funds places and the University can decide the numbers for different programmes.

The NHS in Scotland (like the other four countries) is haemorrhaging staff so rather than try and keep the nurses they already have, the Scottish Government is trying to plug the gap by just recruiting more and more student nurses. So the Universities need to do that or else they can get 'fined'.

Add to the mix that the variety of good learning environments in hospitals and communities is not enough, so student nurses don't get the wide range of placements they really need to get a well rounded learning experience. They will just stick a student in a hearing aid clinic for weeks on end just to say they have a clinical placement - no nursing required but they will learn generic stuff like teamworking and communucation skills etc. The NMC also allows some clinical placement hours to be taken in a simulated environment ie in a fake ward in the Uni with mannueqins instead of human patients.

Student nurses are also being placed in social care housing where they are literally dusting and hoovering residents' rooms to pass the time. A student nurse can get through all their training without even being in a surgical ward, for example - but the NMC/Uni will argue they can learn 'surgical nursing skills' say, in a care home. Well yes, they can change some basic dressings in a care home, but they are missing the care of a patient post-operatively/in the acute phase of their care, when the patient is unstable. So if they then end up working on a surgical ward when they qualify, they don't have a good grounding to build upon.

Registered nurses who supervise and assess the students on placement are often reluctant to fail them so they might give a low grade (but which is a pass) hoping the next placement will fail them - but that doesn't always happen. It's also quite easy for a student with poor performance to "hide" in some placement areas - for example, being nice and cheery and giving out cups of tea will endear you to staff but doesn't mean you know what you are doing nursing wise. This is even worse with male students (who are largely the ones who join the degree and go and work as health care assistants) as the mainly female registered nurses can try to mother them. My niece told me that one of the nurses on a ward she was placed on took the male student's uniforms home to wash and iron because he looked really scruffy and she felt sorry for him!!! But hey, he was lovely to the patients. God almighty.

Universities set and mark their own work

The work they set and mark is reviewed by external examiners

This depends on fields, but in mine (tech) I’ve hired plenty of so-called ‘low ranked’ uni grads. My own DP Is one of those, failed his A-levels, got into uni because he passed their own programming assessment. He’s one of the best devs in his cohort and now makes bank.

However these people succeeded despite their uni - they were the sort programming since they were kids, into video games, etc. Sadly the people with no background, in the same sort of courses flounder badly. Doubly so since there’s no placement year. And ‘group work’ which while it sound great on paper means people can get away with doing nothing. So many fall over when I asked probing questions about what they’d actually done.

‘Most’ people who started from scratch in high ranked universities however genuinely know their stuff. There are a few exceptions of course but I find the rigour much higher. It could also be because of the peer pressure in RG unis, get your own projects, learn more stuff outside the syllabus these people come in with quite a bit of practical ‘experience’ already and it shows.

the lower ranked unis don’t emphasise doing anything beyond the coursework…

Also to add - these are the lower ranked ones without a placement year. Placement years are excellent

@Piggywaspushed I've working with nursing programmes at a number of Universitys. The NMC don't check attendance. The requirement is that the student completes a programme with a minimum of 2300 theory and 2300 practice hours - so the student has to complete the programme but there is no mechanism for dealing with non-attendance per se. When monitoring the University, the NMC will require to see the Univesitiy's polic for dealing with poor attendance/non-enagement, but they don't get directly involved with it, if that makes sense? The only thing that they must absolutely show proof of is the 2300 clinical placement hours which as I've said upthread, can be poor quality/manipulated.

It comes down to 'professionalism' and engagement - but again, how do you monitor 'attendance' for recorded lectures? Or engagement for that matter - you can 'see' when a student is online on a module, but they can be running the module in the background and watching TV, or even working with the module running on a mobile phone - which my niece says does happen. This will show in the module data as the student engaging with the module for x hours, but they are not. All they need to do is pass at 40% and since there are very very few on-campus, invigilated exams, they can get help with this. Interestingly, RG Universitys are the ones who are strongly favouring a return to these type of exams/vivatype assessments for undergradaute courses, as it is the only way of knowing the student has undertaken/passed the assessment themself.

Your point about showing you have made up a missed session - yes, the University might ask the student to do this particularly if the student has missed face to face lectures or clinical skills sessions - but the student can just cut and paste/borrow someone's notes or whatever to show they have undertaken the learning. Some Universitys have upwards of 1000 nursing students on a programme and there is no capacity for the lecturer to bring the student in for a face to face session to get the student to tell them what they understand, to really know if they have done the learning.

UWS (and other Universities I am told) have stopped the requirement to show evidence at mitigating circumstances panels for a couple of reasons. Some GPs were charging up to £50 a time whereas others were giving letters our for free - so it was unfair. Some GPs who were geographically close to campuses were even refusing to do it (unless the student was on a ventilator, broke a leg or whatever) as they were innundated for requests for letters saying the student had 'anxiety', 'mental health problems' etc. Also - it doesn't need to be a GP - the student can get the Student Support person at the University to say they had mental health problems and couldn't do the exam and that person will 100% of the time support the student, even if they are playing the system.

Believe me, it is very very difficult to deal with a student who is not attending/submitting assessments if they know how to play the system, which they learn to do even if they don't know when they start!

Although children will obviously do as well as possible at A level (and I am a real advocate of work ethic and the psychology of putting in their best performance) is there a benefit of getting good A levels of at the end of the day even those with poorer A levels will go to university and get in all probability a 2:1 or 1st?

I think those that advocate that 'all universities are equal' have to think about the consequences of such a view. We may be left with a HE playing field where you have Oxbridge and 'the rest'. 1% will go to elite universities and 99% will go to universities which in the new world order will have theoretically equal standards and reputations.

to my mind this is really unfair on both students and universities leading to a real Oxbridge or just mentality for very academic children where they know failure to get into Oxbridge will le ad to a place in the homogenous swathe of other universities.

This is not the case at present but if we take some of the current attitudes towards the equality of degrees it may well be.

I work in tech within the banking sector. The biggest problem with tech graduates in general is the quality of tech education in the UK. It’s still possible to walk out of a Computer Science degree without knowing how to program which is unacceptable.

How can you miss something so blindingly obvious as the fact that an unconditional offer isn’t a degree qualification? You have to do years of work to get the latter. You could argue that those without A levels would have to work even harder given they didn’t have pre-existing knowledge.

The only reason universities have entry requirements is that they don’t have capacity to let everyone in. Otherwise, the course demands themselves would weed out those who weren’t capable.

@Wenfy

I work in tech within the banking sector. The biggest problem with tech graduates in general is the quality of tech education in the UK. It’s still possible to walk out of a Computer Science degree without knowing how to program which is unacceptable

Yep thats me! My degree includes software development but I can't actually code. Hence my post further up the thread about University of Plymouth being the embarrassment in our industry 😳 although my sector is more engineery

@Polis - only a tiny amount is reviewed by the external. No more than 10% of the total. The external may comment on the range and level of assessments on the course, but the University is not required to accept their feedback - although the Senate office will review externals' reports and want an explanation from the programme leader.

I've been/am currently an external examiner and I've seen some really shit student work getting passed - and some really shit assessments - for example, ethics being assessed by a 40 multiple choice question exam. It was basically a number of definitions and the student nurses were not required to show any understanding of the ethical dilemmas they may face in practice ie application of ethical theory. I fed back that I thought this was completely inappropriate and would not assess the knowledge required and recommended a change to a case scenario/written assessment. I was thanked for my feedback but they didn't change it - reason was they didn't have the staff required to mark an essay and an MCQ marked itself. The University accepted that as they couldn't commit to taking on more staff.

I've also fed back at one University that the standard of work required to pass was much lower than what I had seen at other institutions (this was London University) and again, nothing changed.

I've been/am currently an external examiner

So have/am I.

The external examiner system is really not rigorous. Honestly. For so many reasons.

Apart from anything else, universities and programme teams appoint their own examiners. So they just pick people who work on similarly poor courses.

Then there’s the fact that the actual process is a total box checking nonsense in many cases. It really is not whatever you’re imagining it to be.

In terms of reviewing student work, module leaders often select the samples they want examiners to review. And the
examiners’ information about the programme is carefully managed by the programme leadership anyway.

And you actually believe the external examination process is fit for purpose?

Same with accounting degrees, where a graduate doesn't necessarily know how to prepare a set of accounts! They are taught the basic theory of double entry book-keeping etc, but it's just one module, in the first year, so doesn't count towards the degree!

A-Levels, as with lots of other qualifications are a stepping stone to the next level of study. Once you reach that next level, for the most part they become largely irrelevant.

The things that devalue degrees are the sheer volume of people going to university, and the calibre of the courses on offer. A great many degrees aren't particularly pertaining to a career in any given field, and people end up in roles which they'd access without a degree.

I believe those pupils would have sat a separate exam and been through a fairly rigorous interview process. I don’t think they just whacked a few hobbies on their UCAS form.

This! With bells on!!!

People love to mock Lincoln but most of them have no actual knowledge of it.

I've been there for postgrad, and wish it existed when I went to uni the first time. This was my fourth direct experience of uni and the best by a huge distance.

@Wenfy hi friend, we might even work for the same company 😂
i have both an accounting/finance and a computer science degree and yes, can attest to the large variation in quality for these things.

It’s very strange, we have plenty of people with various degrees who are better at programming. Of course as computer science is technically not just about programming, but maths unfair to expect everyone to have lots of programming hours but the ability to look at code and not go totally blank is a bare minimum. CompSci has one of the highest unemployment rates (https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/18-06-2020/sb257-higher-education-graduate-outcomes-statistics/study)

And sadly this primarily impacts women, and those from unrelated backgrounds because they don’t often know that
their degree is inadequate. A lot of our ‘diverse’ hires did boot camps/own projects alongside their degree, like me. Better unis have a lot of these things, not so much the lower ranked ones. Not just talking RG unis like Bath, Loughborough are also OK.

Also for accounting - the Big4 take any degree, and most don’t have exemptions so do all the exams anyway. They also have a lot of school leave programs, part qualified etc so easier to have just done that without the £££. A full ACA is NVQ Level 7 which is equivalent to a master’s.

A lot of degrees may be academic and not have immediate career relevancy but if the degree is from a sufficiently respected institution of will be given weight by employers and society as a whole.

One of the issues is newer universities offering courses of limited intellectual rigour that employers do not regard highly and that does a real disservice to the student now 27K in debt.

We should go to a model where the newer universities facilitate work based learning and specialise is that role rather than competing in academic credentials with more established universities. There should be real clarity about graduate outcomes including salary and type of professions entered. Students should be guided by schools to not fall foul of marketing material and taught how to critically analyse prospectuses.

I guess it goes to show that there is no consistency in higher education. I also found my post grad much easier than my undergrad at a top 10 uni.