Posts Tagged ‘education’

Grade inflation? We know how to deal with inflation.

Sunday, August 23rd, 2009

Every year for the last 27 years, the A-level pass rate has increased.

Jim Sinclair, director of the Joint Council for Qualifications, said: “These are excellent results. They are the outcome of the hard work of students and teachers”.

Iain Wright, the schools minister, said: “Critics… are insulting the hard work of students and teachers”.

Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said: “the improvement in A-level results is attributable to the hard work of young people and their teachers”.

I hear tractor production in the Soviet Union is up for the 27th year running, too.

The purpose of qualifications is to be able to discriminate between people on grounds of ability. This is “good discrimination”. If it is really true that people are working harder and teachers are teaching better, then we need to make exams harder to compensate. Otherwise the qualifications will lose their usefulness. How can we tell the difference between candidates if they all have “A”s?

If, on the other hand, more people are passing and more people are getting “A”s because qualifications are getting easier, then we also need to make exams harder.

Either way, we need to make it harder to pass and harder to get an A.

One way we could do this is to fix the percentage of passes and the percentage of “A”s.

When a government inflates the money supply, money becomes worth less. Similarly, the more people who have A-level passes and “A” grades, the less valuable those grades are. To stop inflation, we stop printing money. To stop grade inflation, the government should stop giving out so many “A”s.

If you redenominate a currency, and update all contracts to reflect this, you change nothing. If the Archangel Gabriel1 doubles everyone’s money overnight, and rewrites all contracts by doubling all the amounts, nothing important will change. Nominal prices will double overnight, but no one’s behaviour will change in any nontrivial way. Turkey recently stripped six zeroes from its currency. A million old Turkish Lira are worth one new Turkish lira. All prices and amounts in contracts were divided by one million, and nothing else changed.

We can imagine “a monetary system in which money is measured in fractions of the money supply. Instead of a number like $1000, your bank statement would have a number like ‘one billionth’, meaning that you owned a billionth of all the dollars in the world. Redenomination in this kind of fractional monetary system is so trivial that the operation does not even exist.” Similarly, if instead of saying “You got an ‘A’”, we said “You came in the top 10%”, redenomination of grades would not be possible. Grade inflation would not be possible.

We could fix the number of “A”s given out to, say, 10% of candidates in a given year for a given subject. It is unlikely that students are getting more intelligent or more knowledgeable every year. (For mathematics, the official syllabus has gotten monotonically smaller.) Therefore, with such a large sample size, “A”s from one year ought to be comparable to “A”s from another year.

It might be a good idea to drop the terminology of grades altogether, and just report which percentile a candidate came in. We can take another lesson from the history of inflation. A government might define a franc as an ounce of gold, and it will become common knowledge that a franc is worth an ounce of gold. If the government then debases the currency, the fact that everyone talks in terms of francs disguises the fact that a franc is no longer worth an ounce of gold. If people had never used the superfluous terminology of francs, the deception would not be possible. Similarly, it is superfluous to say that someone who came in the top ten percent got an “A”. We should just say they came in the top ten percent.

What else can be done? We could report more information than just the final grade. For example, exam boards could publish the distribution of marks for a particular paper. Publishing more information on its own will not stop grade inflation, but it can unmask it and so reduce some of its bad effects.

An alternative fix is to switch to a private exam system. The number of candidates for The Institute of Chartered Accountants’ ACA qualification has been steadily increasing, but the proportion of passes has actually declined, because the ICA judge it to be in their long-term interest to maintain the integrity of their qualification. The Economist worries that “an educational Gresham’s Law” is at work on A-levels, “with bad qualifications driving out good as schools push pupils towards easier subjects in the hope of rising up the league tables, and pupils scramble after any old As to present to undiscriminating universities.” But Gresham’s Law only applies when legal tender laws are in force. Many private schools are switching to harder qualifications such as the IGCSE. State schools should be free to do this as well. And instead of saying “we simply don’t recognise the label ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ subjects”, the government should allow universities to treat an “A” in maths as better than an “A” in sociology.

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1. Murray Rothbard – The Case Against the Fed.

“David Hume, in order to demonstrate the inflationary and non-productive effect of paper money, in effect postulated what I like to call the “Angel Gabriel” model, in which the Angel, after hearing pleas for more money, magically doubled each person’s stock of money overnight. (In this case, the Angel Gabriel would be the “counterfeiter,” albeit for benevolent motives.) It is clear that while everyone would be euphoric from their seeming doubling of monetary wealth, society would in no way be better off: for there would be no increase in capital or productivity or supply of goods. As people rushed out and spent the new money, the only impact would be an approximate doubling of all prices, and the purchasing power of the dollar or franc would be cut in half, with no social benefit being conferred.”

I am unable to find a reference to Gabriel in Hume. Rothbard might be referring to Hume’s essay, “Of Interest”, where for a different purpose Hume asks us to imagine what would happen if “every man in Great Britain should have five pounds slipt into his pocket in one night; this would much more than double the whole money that is at present in the kingdom”.

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Posted in Politics by Hugo Hadlow | 3 Comments »

Good and irrelevant discrimination

Friday, September 12th, 2008

“It especially annoys me when racists are accused of ‘discrimination.’ The ability to discriminate is a precious facility; by judging all members of one ‘race’ to be the same, the racist precisely shows himself incapable of discrimination.”

Attributed to Christopher Hitchens

“Discrimination” is condemned widely nowadays, but usually not understood. Without committing the etymological fallacy, the word “discrimination” comes from the Latin “discriminare”, meaning “to divide”, which comes from “discernere”, to discern. Someone who can discriminate is someone who can tell the difference between things or people, and treat different things or people differently. We discriminate all the time: it’s part of ordinary life. Clearly, some (most) discrimination is good.

In the case of universities, an admissions tutor who admits the most intelligent or promising students is discriminating between candidates: namely, the good-enough candidates and the not-good-enough candidates. This discrimination is good because it is relevant. If we failed in our duty to discriminate between candidates, given the limited supply of places at Cambridge University, we would end up admitting worse candidates at the expense of better ones.

If, on the other hand, admissions tutors were to be influenced by irrelevant factors, such as race or background, and discriminate on those grounds, we would also end up admitting sub-par candidates.

Too often, people criticise “discrimination” when they really should be criticising “irrelevant discrimination”. Discriminating on irrelevant grounds creates sub-optimal outcomes, but failing to discriminate on relevant grounds also creates sub-optimal outcomes. We have a duty not to discriminate on irrelevant grounds, but we also have a duty to discriminate on relevant grounds. Sloppiness with language prevents useful debate on this issue from taking place.

I was pleased, therefore, to read that Vice-Chancellor Alison Richard has condemned attempts by the government to encourage universities to recruit more pupils from state schools.

Obviously admissions tutors should only take into account a candidate’s ability. There is no such thing as “positive [irrelevant] discrimination”: any irrelevant discrimination is bad.

As Thomas Sowell has pointed out, “You are not doing anybody a favor by sending them where they are more likely to fail, rather than where they are more likely to succeed.”

In the case of “affirmative action” in the US, “where the racial preferences in admissions are not as great, the differences in graduation rates are not as great. The critics of affirmative action were right: Racial preferences reduce the prospects of black students graduating.”

Discriminating on the grounds of race is irrelevant discrimination and reduces efficiency and overall welfare. Discriminating on the grounds of what school someone went to is also irrelevant discrimination and will have the same effect, ultimately hurting those it is intended to help.

41% of the students at Cambridge went to private school, but private schools educate only 7% of the pupils in the country. Why do so many more (proportionally) private school pupils get into Cambridge?

One explanation would be discrimination in their favour. However, there is no evidence for this1. Laudably, the copies of our UCAS forms that are given to admissions tutors do not mention which schools we went to. There is no reason to believe that Cambridge admissions tutors do not simply admit whichever candidates seem the best.

This leads us to the conclusion that private schooled pupils are better, on average. This may be because the pupils were better in the first place, because private schools are selective. Or it may be because private schools make their pupils better, through better teaching. It is probably a bit of both.

We can fix both problems by closing state-run schools, and making paying for education through a voucher system the state’s only involvement. That way, the market can improve the schools, something the government cannot do, but everyone would still be able to go to school regardless of their income.

The government are putting pressure on universities because they do not want to admit the real cause of state-schooled-pupil under-achievement: government involvement in education.

“A spokesman for the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills insisted that any measures to encourage widening participation at universities were voluntary. ‘We value the independence of universities, but we also want to get the best students into the best courses,’ he said.”

Note the implication that universities are using their “independence” to discriminate against the “best students”, without any evidence to back it up. On the contrary, universities are using their independence to admit the best students, and it is the government that wants them to apply other criteria. And voluntary measures are merely a prelude to non-voluntary ones, of course. There is a chilling effect here, because universities are likely to do what they know the government wants, even without it asking, in an attempt to forestall more government meddling, since the government provides the money. As another vice-chancellor said: “The Government gives me a cheque every year. I have a public duty to do what the Government says.”

I applaud Cambridge University’s long-term project to become financially independent of the government, so that it can pay for the education of the best pupils, regardless of their financial background, without being subject to government meddling.

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1. There is a tendency to assume that disparity in figures automatically implies bad discrimination. Both of the poisonous candidates for the CUSU Women’s Sabbatical Officer mentioned that more men than women studied maths at Cambridge, and of those, proportionally more achieved firsts. They ignorantly assumed this was caused by irrelevant discrimination. Of course, it is actually due to the fact that maths geniuses are more likely to be men. While men and women have the same average ability at maths, variance is higher in men, so there are more male maths geniuses and male maths morons. This is explained by Charles Murray in “The Inequality Taboo”. The following diagram (not to scale) shows this intuitively:

See also http://clubtroppo.com.au/2008/04/06/inequality-how-much-is-too-much/

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Response to two speakers: Simon Heffer and Lord Blackwell

Saturday, May 17th, 2008

Simon Heffer visited CUCA in Lent, resulting in the most attended and best talk of the term. He spoke of the creation of a “client state”, where the Labour Party massively increased the number of tax-funded state jobs in order to increase their voter base. People working in the state sector tend to vote Labour, so Labour’s strategy was clear: make more of them. This is massively costly, but seems to work.

Heffer’s solution is that the Conservative Party should not bother seeking these votes, because they will not vote Conservative anyway. Heffer is a critic of Cameron’s rebranding and apparent change of focus of the party, though has recently said he might consider voting Conservative. (He probably will.) He suggests that Cameron should not adopt policies to try to please everyone including these voters, but should focus on their traditional voter base.

In an article since, “Labour is malignant, not incompetent” (Telegraph, 2nd April 2008), he sees this strategy repeated by Labour with immigration. The Lords Economic Affairs Committee report on “The Economic Impact of Immigration” showed quite clearly that net immigration is not beneficial to the country. This has been obvious for years. The figures show that net immigration does not increase GDP more than it increases population, so has no effect on GDP per person and therefore general well-being. Government responses to this resort to obvious double-speak.

Heffer believes, as do I, that the government has known full well that net immigration is not beneficial, but has pursued it because it knows that immigrants tend to vote Labour. It has put electoral success above the country when it knows they are opposites.

Heffer calls for a radical cut in the amount of money spent by the government, which currently spends over £600 billion per year. Government spending has increased by 50% in real terms while Labour have been in power over the last ten years. As Lord Blackwell pointed out in his talk, the amount of stuff the government needs to provide doesn’t increase every year, so government spending should remain constant. Indeed, this means it should reduce as a percentage of GDP. If the government was spending the same as it was ten years ago, we could have abolished income tax.

Heffer demands tax cuts mostly to save money and free the economy to grow, but he echoes the calls of Sean Gabb for tax cuts to cut the funding to the ruling class – those who draw money and status from the state.

Lord Norman Blackwell visited CUCA yesterday, speaking and taking questions in the Union Dining Room, and then over dinner at Strada. Like me, he is very keen on policy: he worked on policy for Margaret Thatcher and John Major.

He started by talking about how radical some old policies seemed at the time, and how he believes others which seem radical now will be considered common sense in the future. For example, the Post Office used to run the telephone network in this country. As one might expect from a monopoly, the service was shoddy and expensive. If you wanted a telephone, you had to be put on a waiting list, and an engineer had to come to your home and fit one into the wall. You could only buy telephones manufactured by the state, which were very expensive.

People thought that the telecommunications couldn’t be provided by private companies. Now that it is, we know that of course they can.

Later, Lord Blackwell himself presented a report to British Telecom trying to convince them that it was safe for people to have telephone sockets, rather than a telephone hard-wired into the wall. Now, the idea that telephone sockets are dangerous is ludicrous. Then, it seemed radical.

Of course, there is an element of natural monopoly in landline telecomms. It does seem there needs to be some involvement by the state. But it should be as small as possible. As Hayek said, the state needs to create a legal framework in which competition can function. This should be designed to encourage as much competition as possible. Just because a market can’t function without the state, that doesn’t mean the sector should be run entirely by the state.

In the UK, British Telecom runs the lines (and even this is changing), but other companies can run calls on top of them. Much like Network Rail running the train tracks, but other companies running the trains. This is much better than BT doing everything, without having to compete and therefore having no incentive to provide a good, cheap product.

The same thing has been done with broadband internet. Can you imagine what our internet would be like if the government still had complete control of telecomms? Atrocious! Things would never have improved so rapidly.

We probably wouldn’t even know what we were missing out on. In Cuba, the state has to stop its subjects from finding out about the standard of living in other countries, so that they don’t know what they’re missing (toasters). What are we missing at the moment that we don’t know we’re missing? We’ll only find back if we stop the state slowing us down.

So telecommunications is one area where those advocating privatisation have been proved right. So are railways. Alex Singleton of the Globalisation Institute addressed CUCA at the Gin & Tonic party at the beginning of term, and he pointed out that by every objective measure, the railways have been improving since Conservative privatisation – the turning point.

Lord Blackwell suggested that healthcare and education are next to be privatised. People don’t know what they’re missing. They don’t know how good things could be.

However, Lord Blackwell didn’t suggest that “privatising” healthcare meant abolishing tax-funded (“free”) healthcare. Abolishing state-run schools doesn’t mean abolishing free education.

He suggested a voucher system. Consider education. The system would require very little change. Instead of being told what school you must go to, you could choose. Instead of only the state being able to set up state-funded schools, anyone could. That’s all.

He suggested not using the word “vouchers”, for two reasons. One, he thought it was as tainted as “privatisation” for many voters. Two, people didn’t know they wanted it, even though they wanted its consequences. If you offer people “choice” in your manifesto, they say “We don’t want a choice of schools. We don’t want to send our child to the next village. We just want to send our child to the local school, and we want it to be good.”

Choice (i.e. competition) doesn’t even need to be exercised to have beneficial effects. You don’t have to take your business from the local pub and drive to the next town. It’s just the fact that you could that means your local pub has to make an effort.

Similarly, if you go to a bad school and a good new one starts up, things won’t just be improved if everyone moves to the good school and the bad school shuts down. In most cases this won’t even be necessary. All that is necessary is that you can move. That is enough to give the old school some incentive to improve.

A similar scheme could be implemented for healthcare.

He suggested rolling out education vouchers in poor areas first. Even though this would mean richer areas wouldn’t get the benefits so quickly, it would demonstrate that the measures were to improve education in poor areas the most. This might help get voters used to them.

“Privatisation” seems radical in the UK at the moment, but it won’t when people see the consequences. We just need to look at the success of the Swedish implementation of vouchers.

People like to claim that there is something special about education and healthcare: that they are “public services” rather than products like any other. This is wrong. They are products like any other. People said the same about telephones.

Lord Blackwell used much libertarian rhetoric, and seemed to consider himself a libertarian. I’m not sure whether I’m a libertarian or not, though I have very strong libertarian sympathies.

I think vouchers are a good idea. But they’re not a libertarian idea. Vouchers roll back the state by allowing the state to pay for, but not run, education and health. They do mean that the state bureaucracy is smaller even if taxes stay the same. But libertarians would not even have taxes to pay for education or healthcare.

It may be that complete abolition of the welfare state is better for the country, especially in the long run. As Andrew Perraut says, “if markets are as massively productive as we libertarians believe and compounding returns to growth in the long term are taken into account, you could probably justify no more than very basic safety nets, for fear of distorting the economy and dramatically lowering everyone’s goods in the future.” But the safety net could include healthcare and education.

In any case, vouchers are better than the current system, and we need them fast.

My commitment to reducing the size of the state is Perraut’s: any taxation reduces economic growth. Some taxation is necessary, but the optimum amount is far lower than it is at present.

Lord Blackwell’s seems to be for a different reason. Statism cows people. It reduces the striving, self-reliant ethic. If people have a problem, it encourages them to expect the state to solve it, rather than solve it themselves. This attitude reduces economic growth because it discourages innovation.

He ended on a quotation that Lady Thatcher looked up while they were working on a speech. It is one of the closing sentences from John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty”:

“a state which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands, even for beneficial purposes, will find that with small men, no great thing can really be accomplished.”

Postscript.

Afterwards, over dinner, he talked about the historical consequences of global cooling, including the halt of the expansion of the Roman Empire. This would be an excellent way to write an article aiming to change people’s minds about global warming. The scientific evidence that global warming will stop, rather than being catastropic, is clear. We haven’t had any for over ten years. So take this for granted! Treat global cooling as inevitable, and write an article about its historical consequences and how we must prepare to meet them again.

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