The eighth myth: Ratings

The eighth myth:           Ratings is the best way to find the best for higher studies.

8                   Ratings are no good in finding the best for higher studies.

There has never, although many investigations and many published books in the subject, been published a full analyse of how the Ratings work and how they could be replaced, for rankings to further studies. The reason is quite obvious.

By publishing, it would be very clear that the governments have kept the ratings for ranking without any ground for the decision.

There is no best side of using the ratings for ranking to higher studies, compared to the alternatives. On the contrary, there are some serious disadvantages, explained in the text below.

The only employers that would use ratings and paper documents to get personal, are the public health facilities, who all the time have employed personal without exams, getting their jobs on falsified documents.

Falsified ratings and certificates will cause much disaster for the society. One day you might meet an unqualified surgeon in the hospital!

But ratings also is behind some of the recruitment bias to higher studies.

The reasons for the ratings in Sweden, are the supressed alternatives and the lack of impact assessment. Political intrigues is the only possible explanation for the repeated failure.

This text has much in common with the story of the naked king. Thank you for the original idea, H C!

The real myth is that the voters are fooled to believe, that the ratings have been questioned like the missions from the Swedish Parliament and that they are better than the alternatives.

In this text there will be no discussion of the content of the curricula, the goals of the society with the individuals and the society´s real demands in work and private. This will later come in the text The society´s view and demand on the individual.

Not much in this text is about Ranking for higher education.

Not much is discussed about the problem when students are given approval, but in reality, don´t have the knowledge and skills that are given in the goals. This will come in Fail and approved.

It´s well known how the ratings work in the Swedish school system. If you don´t believe so, please visit the main site of the Swedish education board and read their own material. Thereby there is no need for any new inquiry, just a detailed analyse of consequences and a list of alternatives to fulfill the ranking of students to higher education. And to vote in the Parliament.

To make the decision we also need at least three things. First, we need to know the characteristics of the candidates, we prefer for different educations. To that we also need to decide which knowledge and skills in advance we look for and the proof for that they have these knowledges and skills.

None at the decision-making level within the Swedish school, believe in the possibility to get ratings to be of equal value in different schools, not even in different classrooms. It´s not possible by pure logical reasons.

The government have done some work to decrease the effects of unfair differences between schools with ratings. To accomplish that and other effects of that kind, they have changed totally the system for the ratings a couple of times for enormous lot of money. During a period when I sometime was supposed to put ratings for the pupils, Sweden had relative ratings, totally impossible to compare in international perspective. To that also illogical.

All investigations have been wise enough to give away as little information of the work as possible.

Nor have they investigated the needs of intake to higher education and how to establish reliable system to keep track on documentations of fulfilled courses and thereby secure that we know who in fact have done these courses.

At the same time cell phone operators and others in IT are ordered by the governments to in detail report to the police whatever they want to know, have the responsible institutions at the Universities and High schools no idea, to which persons they have given approval to in many courses, and even less control over which rating they are supposed to have got. Sometimes it hurts student, because they can´t get transcripts and their papers can´t be verified.

Sometimes pupils time in the ground school are not documented at all, causing them to start again to get further. The scandals are common.

Actually, we can simplify all and pay salaries and give ratings already by birth. We just note the income of the parents, expected length as adult and the date of the birth. This is very high correlated with first the ratings and later the salary.

This is very sad. None of them should be of interest in this case.

The thing with month of the birth is only a thing to blame the school system for. It shows the incomplete power to plan for fair chances among the students. We and they have known the problem in more than fifty years and nothing has been done.

A modern school has an intake four times a year to eliminate this problem and others as well.

In the future, we must use the possibility to let a child get a second year in the preparing year at the age of six more often, when needed.

In most cases the intake is done in two stages, when there are limitations of the number of students. First, we control the competence, most of the cases this means a rating in some subjects. After that the student is ranked from the points of the ratings sum.

In Sweden, there is a kind of second chance through a general test called högskoleprovet in some subjects. See the site of the Swedish school government (Skolverket).

Bias on the intake to the higher education is not at all the only bad factor of the ratings. Of course, is it an aim to get the difficulties of study the vanish and all the money and effort put to that ought to be paying back better.

The most important problem through the glasses of the society, is of course that the intake of today don´t at all show if the students have the knowledge and the skill we want. Sometimes they have and sometimes they don´t.

This produce unnecessary big costs for the society in the following education, compared to if we actually take the students who really know what they are supposed to know and have the skills we want.

It´s also very bad for the society that the system is seen as unfair, as some schools systematically are helping their students with too high ratings.

The alternatives are two similar system, direct intake tests of some kind, or an initial period of practice to secure that we get a positive sample and then later an intake test. Sometimes is not the intake test there, which give us bad results of the studies.

Intake tests, including tests for art and artistic education, is able to give some level for judgement, but they´re of course hard to get fair. There are no totally fair tests, according to all possible ways to regard them.

But the alternative to make a lottery of the intake is of course not attractive for most people.

With no use for practice periods the intake test is optimal. A longer period of practice before you are allowed to make your application, would probably secure that more students fulfill their studies and make their exams.

In Sweden, sometimes very few pupils in the last year of some professional education, like painters, really want start working as painters. This is causing a personal loss, as well as stupid extra costs for the society.

Shall we take away the ratings totally? Well, at least as an instrument for intake to higher education. As long as the ratings not secure that the pupil in reality has the wanted knowledge, they don´t work for eligibility requirements either.

This doesn´t mean that the school can skip the information to the pupils and the parents. But ratings have maybe never been the most important way to solve that kind of communication, especially not in the case of some kind of approval, in the case when the pupil actually is not reaching the goals.

If the rating alone shall secure that the pupil has fulfilled everything in the goals, this also means that the school must keep the pupil till it has fulfilled the goals IRL, in real life, like the pupils say today.

Ratings are also lousy to be used for evaluating the studies under and after the studies are done. Here we, in the first place, need inner evaluation from the students. They are also the best to know their own weaknesses.

The work of repairing weak understanding and knowledge and incomplete skills, ought to be connected to inner evaluation of the student and automatic evaluations in diagnoses of the material the student has worked with. This can be controlled by the student and the results automatically told to both the student and the teacher at the same time.

Not only pupils of the ground school are let off in a wrong way.

A written test is just investigating a small part of the goals. Sometimes the students are approved by 50 – 60 % of the answers. This is quite weak as to be sure they actually should pass or not. I have sometimes noticed that a full group of more than forty students show desperate bad understanding of the subject and almost no good skills, but in the end, all get their approval. The Swedish universities don’t take the responsibility for bad methods in the classes and bad learning by the students.

As he is making his first steps in the academic world, the later professor always is declared passing with approval, although with great misunderstanding in his luggage. As a professor, he later base some of his results on his weak understanding. Do we find him IRL? I have seen quite a few. None has the nerve to speak out that the king is naked.

Goa the 16th of February 2017              Lennart Warenius