I’ve tried to keep my trap shut as Mark Carruthers manned the Talkback phone lines today, where people were queuing to tell how this bloody algorithm had taken their children’s grades a notch lower and was blocking them from the university of their choice.
I’ve tried but I’m out of patience (and modesty). When, in the 1990s, my daughter applied to do law at Balliol College, Oxford, she was called for an interview. Presumably the school provided a reference of some kind. After some weeks, Balliol College contacted her and made her an offer ‘provisional on your attaining an E or better in your A Level examinations’.
Put bluntly, Balliol was saying it didn’t give a shit about A Level examination results. How could it, when it offered a place to people scoring an E in the A Level exams? The college went, in part, I imagine, by the school reference, and more by what the panel made of my daughter at interview.
There’s a negative and a positive way of looking at the approach of Balliol (I don’t know if they still operate that way). The negative is that it is high-handed, superior, we-know-better-than-any-grubby-exam-markers. The positive is that they’re right – A Level exams are an exquisite form of torture but a ghastly way of assessing someone’s worth.
If I were intent on hiring someone, I’d put considerable weight on how they came across face-to-face, because then I’d have seen the whole package – the living, breathing, talking, thinking human being who’d become my employee. No amount of scribbles on a page could match that kind of close encounter.
So I’m with the parental indignation – young people today shouldn’t be made prisoner of an examination grade arrived at by some whizz-bang algorithm thingy. But they also shouldn’t make the mistake of attaching ability or intelligence to a two-hour scribbling fit in the company of hundreds of similar sufferers.
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