Coronavirus General Discussion

Is it that surprising that on a website where the vast majority of people appear to live in England that the focus is on what happened in England?

It didn't help that the Tories in Scotland were highly critical of the SNP government and called for resignations while the UK government criticised the U-Turn, saying they had degraded their results yet have now done exactly the same thing. I have no love for the SNP but after they admitted their error and corrected it just going along the same path was madness.

That's just a single data point. Any proposal has to be applied equally to every school, and no matter what scheme is used there are going to be some pupils whose evaluation is close the the result they'd have had in the exams and some that won't be close and no possible government would be able to come up with a proposal that got it right for everyone. It's trivially easy to come up with a solution that works well for a small subset of cases. Coming up with a solution that works for nearly every case is far harder, especially when the sheer scale of the task means you can't individually evaluate every situation in person.

Teacher grades may work in some cases but not all teachers are equally competent, some are under pressure to make their schools "look good", some hold grudges against difficult pupils, some are racist, some are sexist, some have entirely arbitrary prejudices. Do you really want someone's results to be based on the evaluation of a person who thinks, for example, "girls can't do science"? It's not as if this is an unlikely scenario. Eliminating biases and creating a level playing field is one of the reasons we have exams in the first place.

Also, I think it's important to remember that "the government" is not just whoever's in Downing Street and their mates. There are hundreds of thousands of people involved and all those people have been educated like everyone else and interviewed for their jobs like everyone else and trained for their positions like everyone else. The cabinet makes many of the final decisions but those decisions are based on the work of people who stay the same from election to election and don't suddenly turn into incompetent simpletons just because the current resident of Number 10 is an oaf.

That is exactly what Boris and Co did!

One rule for the Government and another one for the rest of us?

I didn't say it was perfect, I said fairest and best way. We was always going to end at this solution. Why did the government put the poor students through the last week or so? 

Conservative MP's calling for the Education Minister to go today. Yeah, I think he has messed this up pretty badly for that to happen

As the mask wearing has become more prevalent in my day to day life, I have begun to get scared.

It's not the virus, it's the masks themselves. It's a psychological thing with me I guess. I struggle with eye contact in the first place but now I avoid it even more. I can't read people's expressions with just their eyes. Walking round shops, getting on the bus, and now even at my work, everyone has masks on, and I find it all very eerie, like I've entered a parrellel universe. I feel like all these masked people are glaring at me, judging me, for just existing. My Asperger's doesn't help with this either.

These changes has come too quickly and drastically for me and my ability to adapt to change is impaired and it's so scary, I don't like it

Idk if others feel similar or am I just... weird?

I'm scared to post about this anywhere else too, especially Twitter and Facebook, as someone is bound to get offended.

So sorry you are having these difficulties, basi1fawlty and quite understandable. I haven't been out and about much so not confronted with the problem in same way. I don’t like it though. Just something basically human I think, to want to see the face. Reading expressions very important. Some of us think that the wearing of the full burqa is problematic but we had better not go down that road. Some people have adapted very well and some businesses must be flourishing from the sale of the designer mask, the pretty or sloganed or branded masks etc. But then other people and I think I am one of these, would prefer to see this as a temporary measure and the so called surgical paper one use/one day/one journey mask is sufficient. No need to make it seem permanent. I think some will take to the mask for the foreseeable future if it helps guard against other bugs, flu, colds etc. Or if they feel that having a cold it is more socially responsible to wear them. I think that was the situation in say, Japan before Covid.

One thing struck me- the photos of the politicians and the US campaigns will be forever on the net and in books ( not to mention our own cache of photos) and I’m wondering if in the future people will look at them and shake their heads solemnly, pitying our ignorance of science as we do when we see people smoking all the time in those old interviews and movies.

The government (call Ofqual what you want; it’s still just an arm of low tier governance, there to blame so that the actual policy makers get off scot free) had six months to work out what they were going to do and check it would be fair & accurate. They didn’t run their algorithm enough times or deliberately programmed it to create a new tranche of low paid workers to replace the migrant workers Priti is hell bent on kicking out. Either way I reckon six months is enough not to balls it up on the scale that they did.

The difference comes in as assessed grades are reflecting the ability of a student without any possible issues. In reality there are some who make uncharacteristic errors, crumble under pressure and so on. It wouldn’t be fair to assign that effect to random students, so assessed grades reflect their ability without those pressures. 

It brings into question the nature of examinations as a means of assessment, to be honest. Examinations are not assessing ability, they are assessing how students fare in examinations.

That wouldn't 'make' you pass a French exam either!

I did very well out of exams, but not everyone does, and there is an argument that coursework is a better test of how someone might perform in the workplace (given that when working one is constantly adjusting behaviour, and you are rarely forced to sit down and say what you know for three hours).

The best way of evaluating surely has to be a mix of both exams and coursework - neither are perfect but we need young people who are more than exam-taking machines. If this year's A-level students had had two years of coursework behind them, there would have been a lot more data to feed into an algorithm.

A close friend is getting married today: her mum, his dad, his sister and her kids, her brother and his lot, an aunt and a couple of cousins, masks, social distancing, no party or gathering. They will make it lovely and surround the couple with affection. But on the way home on Friday we passed a club/ pub with about two hundred people heaving outside and on the pavement, not a mask in sight, social distancing, what's that? And I realised what I had long suspected that when the reckoning comes, and it will, in the form of economic collapse, another pandemic , climate catastrophe, the rise of fascism , then the predominant characteristic of humanity will be confirmed as selfishness.

Interesting but we can’t repeat the 70s though in many ways that might be better than what is to come. Democracy is a slippery guy/gal but back in the 70s there was a different feel about things, plenty of unrest, plenty of hardship but the idea that it would be a good thing to destroy society had not yet taken hold. It has now.