I think there’s much more potential for bias when every position is just based on some committee’s prerogative in a way that is very difficult, if not impossible to measure.
I think there’s usefulness to some sort of statistically standardized test that is a good mix in to the many other factors that should be used- essays, activities, awards, interviews, referrals.
I think it’s bad when a test is given too much weight, but if we don’t have any standards with the goal of being objective then I fear only attractive people will get into the best colleges.
searching on the topic, all i find is articles that consider drop-out rates a serious problem, and statictics like this one: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... that shows that rates dropped from 17% to 12% over 15 years.
based on that i highly doubt that any place is using dropout rates as an intentional strategy.
Learning should be about wanting to acquire knowledge, not being forced into it like tuna in a tuna can factory.
but what is the alternative? every university employing their own tests would mean that students now have to prepare for multiple tests based on where they apply.
a job interview system? lot's of bias and unfairness in that too.
in germany school prestige is irrelevant for the university selection process, only the raw grades matter. so actually your best chance to get good grades would be to pick a school that has a tendency to give students better grades.
however if those statistics are not known, as they won't be now in singapore (and i don't know if they are in germany) then your school choice is either random (with respect to learning outcome) or based on perceived reputation of being a "hard" or "easy" school.
there are a number of other statistics that probably need to be suppressed too, such as the number of students that get into university from each school.
Not necessarily. In many EU countries that I am familiar with, there is a standardised, country-wide test which all universities use as their main admission method and which is managed by an entity independent of high schools. Note that this is different from continuous testing throughout the duration of the program. Still, some universities administer their own admission tests in addition because you can't force the university to use only a single scoring method (well, you can't, but it's not necessarily a good idea).
Even so, each university solely administering their own admission tests is how it used to work in the past and it worked rather well, despite being a bit more cumbersome. In the end, if you had real knowledge, it didn't matter that you had to take a few different tests.
> a job interview system? lot's of bias and unfairness in that too.
This does not matter. It just means each business is responsible for its own hires and the only one suffering from a bad hiring process is the business itself. If certain employee qualities lead to an objectively better work performance (and there are surely such qualities), the process will very quickly correct itself to detect those qualities.
It's hard to tell without more context, but it sounds to me like you're conflating criteria based on grades (which are continuously accumulated throughout your schooling years) and admission/certification tests which are only administered once, at the moment you are trying to attain some certificate. My position is that the former is a bad thing, but the latter is necessary and closer to testing the thing that matters: your final abilities.
education should be available to everyone. the only requirement to enter any level of education should be to have passed the previous level.
as for grades vs test, i haven't much thought about that at all. i was merely reporting on how the german system works, without necessarily believing that it is the best system. all these systems are flawed in some way, and in the long run i believe the only system that will work is the one that allows everyone to access university level education.
with more and more university level material becoming available online for free this will eventually become reality. we just need to figure out a way to scale learning and teaching process
The solution is to write a harder test that is only meant for the top 10% of students to take and actually contains harder questions.
There are awesome resources like Khan Academy that have unlimited spots. But with top schools there are limitations to size based on teachers, city spaces, etc.
University is a finite resource.
Also known as education inflation.
i don't agree that more university students devalue universities however. on the contrary, more university level education is in my opinion the best response to less jobs and automation.
we need ever greater and greater parts of our society in higher education to study, research and teach, because all the low level jobs will eventually be automated away.
but imagine what our society can do if we are all educated to the level of a college professor. with more educated people we can address issues such as pollution and climate-change much more easily, and this can only speed up the advancement of our society.
this grade would be different every year because it depended on the grades of the students that actually applied. so while in highschool i was not able to compare myself to my peers nor was i able to evaluate my changes of getting into university. (other than obviously noting that the lower my grades, the lower my chances)
as it happened, the year before the cut-off was on a lower grade that suggested that i'd make it in if it stays the same the next year, but when i applied, more students with higher grades applied too, and my grades ended up being not good enough.