It would appear that education ministers are in the Dreamtime concerning the efficiency of British bureaucracy. For they’re trying to insist that all university place offers should be made only after A Level results are actually known. Rather than the current system whereby some studying for A Levels are granted unconditional places, others conditional upon their results and then the others left scrambling to fit into whatever empty places are left over.
The problem with this being that there is just no way that any British built system of bureaucratic selection is going to be able to cope with the flood of work a proposed move to post-results only selection is going to cause. Worse than that, it’s been looked at in the past and rejected. But still ministers seem to think they’ve a magic wand to wave and it will be done:
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]The university entrance system could be overhauled so students only apply after they have their A-level grades.[/perfectpullquote]A Level results are announced on August 15th.
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]A review is likely to consider whether a post-qualifications admission system should be set up, where students only apply to university after receiving their A-levels.[/perfectpullquote]University normally starts in the mid-September to early October time period.
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] Damian Hinds, the education secretary, said on Monday that he welcomes the review, adding that the rise in unconditional offers “may be symptomatic of wider issues within university admissions processes”. In a letter to Sir Michael Barber, the chair of the OFS, he said: “There is a need to establish whether current admissions processes serve the best interests of students”. [/perfectpullquote]There are some 650,000 people applying to enter British universities each year. That includes post-grads and such but. And that is not the number of applications, that’s the number of people, each of whom may make an attempt to enter more than one institution.
Right, hands up everyone who thinks that any British built bureaucracy can sort through 650,000 applicants in only 21 days? You know, enough time for the kiddies to be told which place they will be attending, find a bed to lay to rest weary fact filled heads and all that?
Anyone?
Now try again with this little tidbit of bureaucratic competence. UCAS is the system that runs this whole thing. If you go to their website you are asked – hey GDPR – if you’ll accept cookies. But you get stranded on their cookies page. There’s no obvious* point at which you can say “Yeah, whatever” and then move on to the page you originally selected.
These people are going to sort 650,000 people between 160 odd institutions along with their hundreds of possible courses each, with applicants having multiple possible choices. In three weeks?
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] Ucas, the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service, previously attempted to instigate a move to a post-qualification system but dropped the idea in 2012. At the time, university leaders claimed that the move would put too much pressure on admissions tutors by forcing them to consider hundreds of thousands of applications in just a few weeks over the summer. [/perfectpullquote]Well, yes. So, who does believe in the Ministerial Magic Wand?
Do note this is before we even get to overseas students who would probably like to know whether they’ve got to move country rather more than a couple of weeks before term starts…..
*Agreed, I’m not wholly technically literate but I’n not entirely stupid either. There’s no method obvious to me at least.
The language we use matters - it provides clarity to our own thoughts and enables…
It is now generally acknowledged that the structure of the NHS needs to be overhauled…
In the film Apollo 13, a loss of oxygen causes the crew to start inadvertently…
There's an idea out there which seems intuitive but then so many ideas do seem…
When we think about the darkly opaque goals of modern central bankers as they relate…
As the papers recently filled with the distressing images of desperate souls looking to escape…
View Comments
There's also the question of what to do with those doing the selecting for the rest of the year. Doubtless resources could be increased sufficiently to enable selection to be over in a week. But that would be a lot of resource to redeploy for the rest of the year.
Just click on the Home icon. it'll take you away from the Cookies menu.
YW.
But will it take me to the page I was originally using Google to find?
Fair point.
I was replying to the original complaint of the Cookies box not disappearing.
Is there really any good reason, beyond some pathetic whimpering about equality, why universities should not offer places prior to A level results? Mature students and those from other countries are offered places without even having seen an A level.
Surely it should be for the university, not the government, to decide who, how and when students are selected.
Has anyone actually determined whether A-level results are a good indicator of success at degree level?
Mine weren't.
And not in a good way.
Is there in fact a problem? This system has been working for years. Maybe there's a need to sort out clearing, when the left-overs who didn't get their choice are matched to schools that didn't fill their places. Matching losers, really. And maybe at that point to get some people and institutions out of the game completely on those grounds.
...you are asked – hey GDPR – if you’ll accept cookies. But you get stranded on their cookies page. There’s no obvious* point at which you can say “Yeah, whatever” and then move on to the page you originally selected...
As far as I understand it, cookie handling legislation is an EU oddity created as a result of a technical feature of the HTTP/HTTPS protocols. .These are 'stateless' protocols - meaning that each packet is an isolated frame of information. You may think of them as postcards - whenever you get a postcard it needs to be understood as a free-standing entity.
Contrast this with a telephone conversation. Each sentence spoken by one of the participants has a context, defined by the call. You know to whom you are speaking, and you know that the sentence you speak is in direct response to the one before. Unlike a postcard, a telephone conversation is a 'session', and contains implied information about 'session management' - a pause to let the other person speak, for instance.
Because HTTP packets do not contain session management data, you need to provide it. For instance, a packet may say 'Next Page, Please'. So there needs to be some way to indicate to the server where you are on the web site, so it knows which is the next page. Indeed, it also needs to know who YOU are, and if you are signed in correctly, and other things like that.
This info is stored on your machine in a little file called a 'cookie', which can be read by the web server to provide all the session management information it needs. So far, so good. Unfortunately, ANY service can read these cookies, or write them to your machine during a web session, and advertisers have jumped on this feature to store information about who you are, what you have accessed, what you have bought, etc. Lots of other people use them to track you in various ways.
So SOME cookies are essential for the operation of the Web, and SOME provide useful extra services, and SOME allow advertisers to be rather intrusive, and SOME are able to be used for frankly malicious purposes. To understand which are which requires computer security aptitude and a fair bit of research work.
The EU have simply ordered that everyone should be given the choice of which cookies they accept. Very few people have the time and information needed to make such a choice, and doing so would make a web session impossibly tedious. So most people just accept them.
Looking at the UCAS site I see that they have chosen to make the session impossibly tedious, and offer options which include sending an email to each cookie provider so that you can have a conversation about what they are doing before accepting the cookie! What a good way to ruin the web....
Generally the session information is stored on the server, not in the cookie which is placed on the client's device. What the cookie does contain is a session identifier - a unique ID which gets passed along with each request to the server. The server then uses this to look up the session data it's holding for that user.
The creepy tracking occurs due to session persistence - when cookies hang around for a long time - and the aggregation of ads etc by a small number of large companies which push ads to lots of sites, e.g. Google. They link together all the session IDs from the cookies that relate to you, and can then push ads to you on all sites based on what you've viewed on a single one.
You can also be tracked on a combination of other characteristics which can be detected by a site, such as web browser version, screen resolution and ip address so whilst deleting your cookies on a regular basis is a good move, it's not a panacea.
Er - yes, but i didn't want to make the explanation even longer than it was. We can always note more detail - for instance, it;'s not YOU that is tracked by amalgamating software versions and other remotely readable data, but your computer. Which might also be someone else's computer as well...
One of the best (but far from the most significant) arguments for leaving the EU is to obviate the need to click on "yes, I agree to your stupid cookie policy" on every single web site I visit. Often, I have to do this every time I return, too - US sites (to the surprise of no-one) are generally the worst offenders.