For years now, higher education has been convulsed by a never-ending hunt for racism. A certain type of academic or student activist sees it oozing out of every pore of campus life, from statues to ‘microaggressions’ to student bar fancy-dress nights.
And yet, if you were looking for a clear-cut example of a racist university policy, you’d struggle to find one more outrageously racist than this: dumbing down exam practices so as to better accommodate ethnic-minority students. Welcome to 21st-century academia, where you can’t wear a sombrero but you can lowkey suggest black and brown people are stupid.
This is the news, reported in the Telegraph, that Oxford and Cambridge have been ‘given the green light’ to move away from ‘traditional’ exams so as to improve the prospects of ethnic minorities and poorer students. This was revealed in Oxford and Cambridge’s new ‘Access and Participation Plans’, which have reportedly been given the thumbs up by the Office for Students.
Oxford’s plan says it intends to ‘use a more diverse and inclusive range of assessments’, which many fear is a euphemism for a drastic lapse in standards – swapping in-person, unseen exams for takeaway papers and open-book tests, which in an age of not just the internet, but also ChatGPT, seems spectacularly ill-advised. Cambridge’s proposals suggest ‘assessment practices’ could be driving performance gaps, and hopes a new approach will ‘improve outcomes’ for black and British Bangladeshi students in particular.
It is no great insight to say that Oxbridge is the preserve of the elite. Any effort to remove barriers to smart but less-privileged kids being able to get into, and thrive at, these august institutions is obviously laudable – and totally uncontroversial. But that’s not what this is about, is it? This is a patronising shortcut to more favourable-looking attainment statistics. It will also leave the source of any real disadvantage unaddressed.
The notion that Oxbridge’s standards need to be lowered to benefit students from our mulitracial inner-cities is particularly perverse, given low standards are what have failed so many of these kids in the first place. Vast swathes of the state-education sector now demand little and expect less of poor and working-class pupils of all pigmentations. When renegade schools, such as Katharine Birbalsingh’s Michaela in Wembley, buck the trend by demanding discipline and high standards, they are derided as mad, bad and reactionary.
The debate around higher education seems gripped by the conviction that we can fix problems, not just of educational attainment but within society more broadly, by dicking around with the admissions and examinations policies of a few elite universities. Forget improving state schools. Forget boosting the economic lot of those at the bottom, so that parents have more time and resources to aid in their children’s education. You’d be forgiven for thinking a few ‘unconsciously biased’ dons and hopelessly ‘old-fashioned’ testing methods are all that stand between us and utopia. It’s ridiculous.
And it can only undermine the function we would all like our top-class universities to perform: to find, educate and expand the horizons of our most academically gifted young people, regardless of where they started off in life. Indeed, this new racial/class paternalism, this tendency to confuse excellence with elitism, risks destroying the very thing that makes Oxbridge so transformative for those who defy the odds to get there.
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