Qualificationitis
Education Reform, In The News Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007
Has the world gone stark-raving or are we addicted to certificates? How many exams do you need?
There is a vast difference between quals for technical subjects like plumbing which are objectively assessed (you can either fit a pipe or you can’t and when the water flows through it you either get wet or you don’t) and non-technical subjects like history or English which are subjectively assessed (whether you think Jane Austen was a closet-Marxist may be based on scant evidence but that is your opinion and you are entitled to it!). You can’t have a system which purports to be objective and is instead nothing of the sort because that is being dishonest and Government is supposed to be setting a good example.
Why not scrap all qualifications for non-technical subjects and replace them with a general Arts cert. based on how many hours of study the course took?
“Why not scrap all qualifications for non-technical subjects and replace them with a general Arts cert. based on how many hours of study the course took? ”
Because even in non-technical subjects employers and academic institutions are interested in how much you know and what you can do not how long you spent studying it.