In theory, there could be a 100 per cent pass-rate if the answers are good enough, or a 100 per cent failure rate.Unfortunately, criterion referencing in its purest form does not work. “The policy of ’strong’ criterion referencing has failed,” Dr Cresswell told a British Academy conference “Human judgement can’t be reduced to a system of mechanics. Yet, for the past 20 years, people in this country have tried to do just that.” The picture is not wholly negative. Dr Cresswell insists that A-levels remain valuable qualifications, so long as their limitations are accepted. They are useful to individuals, and offer a rich source of qualitative evidence about how students’ answers have changed over time. Harvey Goldstein describes the system as “about as good as you can get”. But, he says, it cannot be used to carry out political purposes without shortchanging the students.

“If you try to use it to peg standards, you’ll distort the whole system and that’s what has happened. It’s true for all public exams and it always has been.”Which means that it is also true for a Baccalaureate. And for the national curriculum assessment results, published this week.education independent.co.uk. The wind of change that is whistling through higher education in the UK has been making itself felt in Northern Ireland.

There Sir George Bain, vice-chancellor of Queen’s University Belfast and the man appointed by Tony Blair to sort out firefighters’ pay, has been transforming a traditional, not to say old-fashioned, university into a modern academy fit for this millennium.
To this end he has been restructuring, axing underperforming departments, redeploying academics, and setting up new offices – one to raise money from alumni, another to recruit international students – as well as introducing new initiatives to tackle tasks such asimproving the position of women in the hierarchy.He now proclaims that Queen’s is in the top 20 for research in the UK, on a par with other members of the “Ivy League” Russell Group. “When I came, I found an institution that virtually everyone agreed was not achieving its full potential,” he explains “Thirty years of civil war was one reason. It had been difficult to recruit staff from outside Northern Ireland. It was also an institution that had lost touch with some of the major currents in higher education, in particular the national and international standards of excellence in some areas.”Now, he says, Queen’s is marching up the league tables.

Sir George thought the makeover would take 15 years – and he only had seven. (He retires in two years time at the age of 65.) His objective, as he puts it, was to begin to restore Queen’s self-respect, to get it back to where it was before, as one of the highly respected civic universities of the UK. He clearly feels he has done that.Once a backwater consumed by the sectarian problems of Northern Ireland, Queen’s is now trying to look outwards The peace process has helped. It wants to attract more students from the UK mainland – to give more variety to the student body, 95 per cent of which comes from the Province – and it wants to burnish its international reputation by recruiting more students from overseas It might be more successful with the latter than the former. The peace process is a relatively new phenomenon, and the Troubles are seared on the memories of the British parents of today’s teenagers.Until the late Sixties there were sizeable numbers of Brits at the university, according to Robert Miller, a senior lecturer in sociology, who has studied the issue But that contingent dried up with the Troubles.