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  3. Britain’s excitable press sometimes gets into a flap over odd issues. One recent example is the Daily Telegraph, Britain’s best-

Britain’s excitable press sometimes gets into a flap over odd issues. One recent example is the Daily Telegraph, Britain’s best-

admin2013-08-05  53
问题     Britain’s excitable press sometimes gets into a flap over odd issues. One recent example is the Daily Telegraph, Britain’s best-selling broadsheet. As David Cameron announced that Britain and the euro zone would part ways — normally fertile ground for the right-wing rag—it splashed on the story that an examiner had advised teachers "you don’t have to teach a lot" to pass the tests set by the exam board for which she worked. Today, as the same examiner was hauled in front of the Commons select committee on education, its main headline was "Teachers giving students exam questions".
    Concerns about how England’s exam system works are long-standing: the Commons committee’s ongoing investigation into the administration of examinations was initiated some time back. Nor is the concern limited to the English system, the committee is looking outside England and the Daily Telegraph also recorded an examiner from the WJEC, the Welsh exam board, as saying. "We’re cheating. " Part of the reason is the inexorable rise in exam passes. Ever since the system was reformed in 1988, school children have been graded by their absolute rather than their relative performance. When the reforms were enacted, roughly 5% got the top grades. Over the past ten years, the proportion gaining the highest marks has doubled from 9. 4% to almost 20%.
    A second reason is gripes from university tutors and employers, who reckon that school leavers are not as accomplished as they used to be. Even the most selective universities now provide remedial courses to address the gaps in the knowledge of their newly recruited undergraduates. Meanwhile the Confederation of British Industry frets that poor standards of English and maths among school leavers could hinder economic growth.
    At the select committee today, Steph Warren, a former geography teacher who was filmed implying that the exams set by Edexcel, her employer, were easy, set out to explain her position. She had been quoted out of context, she said. The film was made at the end of an exhausting training day during which she had been berated by teachers for setting an exam that their pupils had found difficult. That was why she had suggested that "you don’t have to teach a lot".
    But the scandal has raised some valid questions about who are the customers in the marketised system. During the 1950s, when the OTevel and A-level examinations were first devised, they were offered exclusively by universities. That actually made far less sense then than it does now: in 1950 just 3% of young people went to university; today some 45% of youngsters enrol.
    Yet following the 1988 education reforms, the university boards lost out to new competitors. Some merged, some folded. The four main exam boards in England and Wales now comprise a department of the University of Cambridge, a profitable company and two charities.
    In the interests of transparency, I should disclose that the company, Edexcel, is itself owned by a publisher, Pearson, which, through its ownership of the Financial Times, also owns a stake in The Economist. That said, Pearson has never, to my knowledge, tried to influence the editorial content of this newspaper. And The Economist itself has its own educational venture; successful completion of a course will gain you a certificate of achievement signed by John Micklethwait, the editor of The Economist, no less.
    In today’s Daily Telegraph , an anonymous examiner is quoted as saying that the "cause of the rot, ultimately, is competition between exam boards". I think there is some truth in that remark. The problem with the existing system, as I see it, is that the exam boards do not see universities as being their customers. Rather, the customers are mostly school teachers. And, naturally enough, teachers want to enter their pupils for exams that they will pass. Instead of harnessing market forces to drive up standards, the system does precisely the opposite. It should be reformed to incentivise a race to the top.
    One way to do this would be to give universities a stronger role in setting school-leaving exams. However universities are not as saintly as they like to pretend: grade inflation is also rife in higher education. According to the Higher Education Statistics Agency, the proportion of students who gained a first-class degree now stands at 14% , up from 10% a decade earlier. In some institutions, the proportion is far higher.
    So my suggestion is that universities should be given a greater say in judging the ability of school leavers, but that employers should also be given a greater say in judging the ability of university graduates.
Which of the following is TRUE about school leavers?
选项 A、They are not as brilliant as they used to be.
B、Many of them don’t want to continue their study.
C、Their knowledge falls short of university tutors’ expectation.
D、Their performance poses a threat to the development of society.
答案C
解析 细节题。由school leavers定位至第三段。由前两句可以看出中学毕业生的知识水平达不到大学要求，因此大学提供补习课程，故[C]为答案。首句中提到“school leavers are not as accomplished as they used to be”，这里是指能力不及过去的学生，与聪明与否无关，排除[A]；文中没有提到中学毕业生是否想要继续学习的问题，[B]无依据；分析末句可知，[D]与之含义不同，排除。
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