The Nice People Thread, No.16: A Universe of Niceness.

Pyxis

Jackmydad wrote: »

I've never seen one. Not in the wild.

This is why.........

NB.. there may be a couple of tiny enclaves too small to register on the later map......Brownsea Island being one of those.




I hadn't realised the red squirrel decimation in England was quite so recent.

Jazee

I saw my first ever red squirrel just this week in North Yorkshire while on a dog walk. Was quite excited. Called it Tufty.

Pyxis

Jazee wrote: »

I saw my first ever red squirrel just this week in North Yorkshire while on a dog walk. Was quite excited. Called it Tufty.

Gosh! That's quite far south! Maybe there's an active red squirrel repopulation thing going on? I think there might be a couple of those in Cornwall.

chris_m

Pyxis wrote: »

This is why.........

NB.. there may be a couple of tiny enclaves too small to register on the later map......Brownsea Island being one of those.

I hadn't realised the red squirrel decimation in England was quite so recent.

There are several reasons for the decline, all caused by man. There is an element of habitat loss but most of the decline is due to the tree rats, again for several reasons.
Firstly, I believe they breed more prolifically - larger litters and maybe more litters per year.
Secondly, the tree rats can eat ripe, or less ripe, food which the reds cannot. Hence in areas where there are/were both, the tree rats get to the food first and none of it lasts long enough to get ripe enough for the reds.
Thirdly, and I think this is the greatest problem nowadays, the tree rats carry the squirrel pox virus to which they are immune but which is deadly to the reds.

Obviously the habitat loss is down to man, but so are all the issues due to the presence of the tree rats - because people imported them because they thought they'd "look cute" running around the gardens and woods of their posh gaffs. I guess it never occurred to them that the blighters would also happily run around outside their gardens.

There is a similarly man-made problem with/for our largest native mammal, namely the red deer. People imported sika deer, again for their posh gaffs, and they also escaped, or were let out. The problem is that they are so genetically similar to the red deer that they can, and do, interbreed and produce viable offspring. In some areas it's unlikely that thee are actually any truebred red deer around. Those in geographically isolated locations, such as Mull and a few other islands are being monitored and looked after very carefully because it's not impossible that they will end up being the only true red deer left.

The worst of the lot is the Scottish Wildcat which can, and does, happily interbred with household moggies. It is considered possible that there are actually no completely purebred wildcats left, and the numbers of those which are only slightly crossbred are estimated to be in the low hundreds if not fewer in the wild.

Cakeguts

LydiaJ wrote: »

This is nonsense. If the grading system only separated students into "the top 1%" and "everybody else" then the brightest students would feel colossal pressure to get into that top 1%, and the universities would be clueless as to which students were any good or not. The grading system currently tells the universities which students are in more or less the top 10%, more or less the next 15%, and so on down the range. This is what they want to know. It is precisely because it tells the universities more or less what they want to know that the students find it so stressful. If a particular university only wants to recruit students in the top 25%, then any of the other 75% of students who have set that up for themselves as the standard they are aiming for will be disappointed. Anything competitive creates stress in those competing.



This is fundamentally NOT TRUE. Please see the publications.parliament.uk document in my next paragraph, which will explain to you how the calibration is done.



PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE LISTEN CAKEGUTS.

Everybody knows that the top grade is A*, so "A and A*" means "the top two grades". It has NEVER EVER EVER been the case that only the top 1% got any specific thing. The A used to be the top 10%, and the B was the next 15%, so 25% of students got the top two grades. If you don't believe me, read this. If it's now 26.7% getting the top two grades, that change is negligible.

They did in 1976 when I took my A levels. A grades were as someone else who did their A levels in 1976 has said recently were like hen's teeth. So were the award of 1st class degrees. I went to a grammar school and only about one person every two years or so got 3 As for A level and they always got straight into Oxford or Cambridge. It wasn't true that the stress levels were higher then for people to get As because the vast majority of A level students knew that they would not get an A grade at A level because these only went to the really really exceptional students. I was there at the time so I know this to be true. What I am hearing now is that students are stressing to get As and A*because they feel that they are failures if they don't get one of these grades because the 25 grade inflations has made them feel that they could win the lottery if only they work hard enough and long enough. In my day any A level pass was a celebration of achievement and people didn't feel let down if they didn't get an A or an A* because it was accepted that most people wouldn't. So a grade D was just as good because it was the pass that that person had managed in an A level the gold standard exam. The other thing that has happened because of grade inflation is that top universities like Oxford and Cambridge don't make offers anymore because they can't tell who are the best students because the A levels are 25 time easier and lots and lots of average 6th form students get As and A*s. What the top universities used to do was to make offers of things like two Es if they really wanted someone to study at their university. Of course those people didn't normally get only 2 Es and would normally get 3 As but it meant that very bright intelligent students from not so good schools could still get a place if they didn't get the 3 As because of the bad teaching at their school


The calibration went something like this. Top 1% and only the top 1% of marks always got an A. The next so many percent got a B then the next so many percent got a C and so on until E if you didn't get enough marks to be in these percentages then you automatically failed A level and got another O level. If you didn't get into a high enough percentage to get an O level you got a U for unclassified so basically nothing. Now if there was a year when A levels had easier papers the top 1% were still the only people to get an A. So employers and universities knew which were the exceptional people from these calibrated grades. If you got an A you were an exceptional person. Because of this calibration some years there were only 2 marks between an A grade and a C grade.



Then someone had a "bright idea." They got rid of the calibration and awarded grades based on marks instead of percentages. So straight away educationalists meddling and government meddling devalued the A grade as a sign of an exceptional achievement that only 1% of A level students could achieve. That has now been devalued 25 times so that an A grade is now no longer a sign of an exceptional student it is the sign of an average one.



A levels are marked on a scale. A* to E so if you start to inflate the grades this happens. The people who used to get Bs get As the Cs get Bs the Ds get Cs and the Es get Ds and the old fails get Es. So the next grade would be an F but there aren't any so what you have to do is make the whole A level course easier so that you can start again from the top.



So starting from my A calibrated A levels in 1976 where A grades were like hen's teeth you work down through the grades to get to the grade that would have been awarded in 1976 to someone getting an A* now and it would have been Y grade. A grade so low that it would have been unclassified and by my calculation about minus 1000 marks. You have to remember that in 1976 only about 8% of the people passed A levels. The others did vocational courses at colleges and technical colleges that led to real jobs they didn't do waste of time and money university courses in performing arts, dance, fashion, ceramics ( pots) which don't lead to jobs and only lead to debt.



Those calibrated A levels that I took in 1976 where only the top 1% got an A grade were much fairer than what we have now where they are not calibrated. Someone doing an A level in the 1970s could guarantee that at the end of the two year A level course their grade A would be worth the same as it was at the beginning. That is not the case now. Someone starting an A level course in September this year could find that by the time they finish the course grade inflation over two years has devalued their A again.



If you go to university the grades are meaningless because the universities change their entry requirements to match the grade inflation. The problem is for the people who take A levels but don't go to university. Because the grades are not calibrated employers can't tell what an A student is going to be like from year to year because the standard of the A grade keeps dropping. So the HR departments have come up with a way round this. They ask for a degree for any job including all the jobs where you don't need a degree to do the job.



In 1976 you could be offered a really good job with good prospects and good pay if you had two A levels at grade C. Now for that same job you have to get into debt of at least £30.000 plus living expenses lose 3 years of seniority in order to get the same kind of job that you used to be offered after 6th form with no debt.



All the people who took A levels in the 1970s and earlier knew how the system worked. As soon as GCSEs were introduced the then government started meddling in A levels and the grading system and then along came a politician who had a "bright idea". More people should go to university and that would have been a good idea if at the same time the number of jobs needing a degree had increased by a large number but they haven't. This has stayed roughly constant. So what we have now is a nationwide political and educational scam that results in 1000s of young people getting into debt for no advantage over what they would have got if they had done A levels, technical college or college in 1976.



What upsets me about the A level grade inflation is this. There are vested interests in 100,000s of young people getting into serious debt. This money pays the university staff, it props up teaching jobs all over the country it pays for rents for new student accommodation which is often owned by the universities. All of which has happened because of grade inflation on A levels which started when the government meddled in the grading system.



Now I know that an A* now would have been graded as a Y in 1976 so what about the people who don't get an A or A*. As it stands at the moment our education system is telling young people that it is a good idea to get into more debt than they can ever pay back in a lifetime. This information is being taught to students who have never had a full time job and have no concept of how long it takes to pay back £50k. Not only that but many of the students who are receiving this information are not intelligent enough to work out what happens if they borrow more money that isn't a student loan and does have to be paid back. Then the same government that has meddled in the grade inflation is worrying about how much debt young people have that doesn't include student loans or mortgages and people think that it is alright to pay for everything on credit because they have been taught that borrowing money is "a good thing."



My parents generation did not buy things on credit. There is a reason why the baby boomers appear to have more money. They started work at 16 or 18 with no debt but in the same level of job that now needs a degree and a huge debt to pay for the degree.



There are alternative exam systems that are calibrated. IB and Pre U are both harder courses than A levels and the grades don't devalue from year to year. However what happens to a schools league tables if a school gets fewer passes in IB than they do from A levels? So here is the next nationwide educational problem. School league tables. School league tables safeguard the jobs of teachers. They don't do anything for the students because the league tables are calculated on the grades that student get just before they leave school. So the league tables are for the future parents to send their child to that school. There is a vested interest in schools offering A levels over Pre U or IB because it makes their league tables look better. This is not for the benefit of the students who might benefit from a more academic course like Pre U or a course offering study of more subjects to a higher level it is only for the benefit of the people whose jobs depend on parents sending their child to that school.


I really don't like people being scammed or mislead. If A levels were crisp packets you would be getting fewer and fewer crisps in each packet so that it was noticable that this was happening but the price was increasing a lot. People would complain about company profits and fat cats.



The A level scam only works well with conning young people out of a lot of money for nothing now because only the people who are around 60 now and who got A levels understand what is going on.

PasturesNew

chris_m wrote: »

....for their posh gaffs...

So ... in short ... a lot of it's probably down to your ancestors then!

Cakeguts

Now for a bit of real life. What happens if you treat degrees in things like civil engineering like A levels where you inflate the grades and make the course easier and easier with less and less content. Civil enginners design bridges.


Or what happens if you make the certificate that gas engineers have to have easier to pass with less course content?

LydiaJ

In other news, New Dog continues to behave beautifully. We have open treaded stairs, and she is either afraid of them (as many dogs are) or else has been taught in a previous home that dogs are supposed to stay downstairs (although I doubt that because anyone who taught her that would probably have taught her that dogs travel in the boot of the car. This is excellent, because it means we can have her as a "downstairs dog" without having to clutter up the house with annoying stair gates etc.

Cakeguts

Yes I agree 10% got an A grade looked it up on wikipedia which also said that they were norm referenced so I looked that up it said that it was used in job applications to identify the best candidate rather than someone who could perform a list of tasks.


A levels are not norm referenced now they are this list of tasks thing so don't according to wikipedia identify the best student.



And I admit I got the number of grade inflations wrong it is "only" 15 not 25. I don't think that changes much though the grade would still be unclassified.

hjd

Cakeguts wrote: »

Yes I agree 10% got an A grade looked it up on wikipedia which also said that they were norm referenced so I looked that up it said that it was used in job applications to identify the best candidate rather than someone who could perform a list of tasks.


A levels are not norm referenced now they are this list of tasks thing so don't according to wikipedia identify the best student.



And I admit I got the number of grade inflations wrong it is "only" 15 not 25. I don't think that changes much though the grade would still be unclassified.

I really don't think all this lengthy discussion (especially your previous post) has any place in the Nice People thread. You are entitled to your opinions and so is everyone else.
I took my A levels in 1975; my DH has been a teacher and works in admin in a school dealing with data. I probably know more facts about the subject than you but I don't wish to enter into an argument.
Can we just drop the subject now please? (sorry if I'm not being very nice)