Higher education’s collision of values
Written by Steven Schwartz on October 15th, 2008
“The outsiders want the students trained for their first job out of university, and the academics inside the system want the students educated for 50 years of self-fulfilment. The trouble is that the students want both. The ancient collision between each student’s short-term and long-term goals, between training and education, between vocational and general, between […]
Honours revisited
Written by Steven Schwartz on September 25th, 2007
The responses to my complaint about degree classifications have reminded me how difficult it is to reform any educational marking system.
SB is quite correct, for most courses in the Australian higher education system, honours classifications apply only to additional work while the GPA covers performance over an entire degree. But is this a good thing?
As […]
Why hons are off …
Written by Steven Schwartz on September 13th, 2007
Graduation ceremonies should become what we really want them to be: celebrations of everyone’s performance.
That’s why I think it is time we got rid of the current classification system, which ranks graduates as 1st, second, or third class.
As I wrote in an article in The Australian recently, anyone trying to scrap the classification system soon […]