Sunday, July 13, 2008

In praise of PC imaging

My institution has hundreds of PCs so it's perfectly reasonable to expect our tech's to install software and operating systems using disk images prepared once and deployed many times. A stealth problem arose recently as a consequence of the Windows XP image from a few years ago which had been "interfered with" by central tech's responsible for administering our (then new) SharePoint server What a great idea it'd be if PCs could quickly access SharePoint without all that tedious mucking about with DNS? Let's put the name of the server and its IP address in "hosts" -- that'll speed things up for everyone!

So, lo! and behold!, the inevitable happened as Nature intended, and those self-same tech's changed the IP address of the server when the server hardware was upgraded a year or-so later (to ease the changeover). Nothing seemed wrong, since the University's desktop PCs had been upgraded in the interim with a different image to accommodate Office 2007 but quite a few staff laptops slipped through the net. I don't know how many hours my faculty's tech's wasted trying password changes, HTTP header analysis, Novell tweaks and client upgrades because of this blunder (it was tricky as SharePoint was the last server in a line of authentication redirects for external logins), but I'm glad that one of them eventually located the problem in "hosts" amidst the hundreds of out-of-date ad-blocking localhost name resolutions some other bright spark had included ;-)

Moral: Neat ideas need to be tempered with expert knowledge and every man needs to know his limitations!

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Degree classifications: take 2

All this post-Burgess, league tables era discussion of degree classifications and grade inflation is shifting my viewpoint: The Burgess report pretty-much suggests we do away with the 1st/2:1/2:2/3rd/unclassified degree class system & replace it with a transcript ... when I first read about it, I was annoyed: I like the idea of a 1st etc (it's what I'm used to). However, a natural institutional response to all this measuring/league-tabling/student-satisfaction-scoring malarkey is to fiddle things (that's easier than fixing things!) and the emails from MMU, the discussion on the Beeb and stuff that's happening internally here are devaluing the classification system so that it's not fit for purpose any more. How will an employer treat a 1st in Maths from MMU, Nottingham Trent, Oxford Brookes and Thames Valley? By giving it partial credence as a primary filter and then concentrating on the real evidence: Grades, references and interviews. So for future students it's even more important to get a good profile (as well as a "good" degree). I suspect it's all a subtle plan to make 1st/2:1/… meaningless so that it dies a natural death, and that would be closing a chapter in UK HE history :-(

Degree classifications

The BBC article is based on a leaked email from Manchester Metropolitan University quoting an email from their Maths & Computing dept's "academic standards manager" not-so-subtly hinting that a failure to award as many 1st/2:1 degrees as other Universities is a bad thing. I disagree that it's necessarily bad to have some institutions with a smaller rate of 1st/2:1 (variability is natural) and I am wholeheartedly against the implied hint to "drop your standards, the institution needs better statistics". Professional University staff work hard to (a) maintain standards (internally) and (b) maintain comparable standards (with the help of external examiners etc.) and we should continue to do-so.

I and my colleagues are under the same pressure: The institution where I work also awards fewer 1st/2:1 than the sector average. So what? It's a meaningless statistic! What about intake? Compare like with like! Where I work we're proud of the fact that we take students with lower A-level grades than at some other places and give 1st/2:1 degrees to a good proportion of those who make it to final year ... we add value, they work hard to reach the standard. I say to students: Keep it up! And to staff: Resist grade deflation!