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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

> And as an employer I think it would be useful to have a more complete picture of the student than just a single grade.

The current system isn't coping well with COVID-19 but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater here.

The current system is simple, and that means it can be seen to be fair. If studying X at university Y needs grades AAB that's easy to understand and you know it's not biased.

I much prefer that to the American system where every university has an opaque system that purports to look at a complete picture of the student then mysteriously picks white students over Asian students with better grades and can't explain why.

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> The current system is simple, and that means it can be seen to be fair. If studying X at university Y needs grades AAB that's easy to understand and you know it's not biased.

If only it were that simple. Universities often also take in to account the outcome of in-person interviews which are inherantly biased.

Very few universities still do in-person interviews because of that bias. Only Oxford and Cambridge require them. UCL and Imperial offer them optionally.

Some courses like Medicine do have interviews at institutions that usually don't interview.

“Only” the two most famous (and arguably best, in a number of fields) institutions. They set the tone.

They're certainly a good indicator that the class system is alive and well in the UK, but since the rest of the universities rely on the Highers/A-Level results without any interviews I'm not sure what you are implying by "set the tone"

And clearing - i.e. what happens to match people to the vacant spaces left by those who didn't make the offer target - is almost 100% interview based, usually by phone and on results day.

But as a consumer of grades it is not about fairness. It is a heuristic used to predict future performance. And it is possible for grading to be a bad heuristic whilst also being fair to individual students.

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