In the future we will laugh at things we currently take for granted. How we all carry around big slabs of glass as phones and then act surprised when we smash them. Or how we let people get sick, rather than using data analytics to predict illness and get in early. But a special sort of befuddlement will be retained for the future historian looking back at how we run university entry.
Each year, hundreds of thousands of young people apply to university using a system built on smoke and mirrors. They apply before they take their exams and their teachers attempt to guess what grade they might get, to help universities to select their undergraduates. These “predicted” grades are notoriously inaccurate – only one in six applicants achieve what is surmised. While most teachers are busy over-predicting, they under-predict for young people from poorer families, which leads to injustice, lost opportunity and a lack of diversity in higher education. Read more