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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-

admin2013-01-24  57
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 O-level 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.
What is the main topic of the passage?
选项 A、School leavers.
B、Exam system.
C、Exam standards.
D、Exam grades.
答案C
解析 主旨题。本文开篇由Daily Telegraph报道的一则消息引出第二段首句“Concerns about howEngland’s exam system works are long-standing”，然后具体解释了问题所在：中学毕业率和学生成绩不断提高，但同时大学和雇主都反映学生能力降低。之后就报纸报道的事件展开深入分析，指出问题出现的原因。倒数第二段作者给出个人建议“One way to do this would be to give universities a stronger role in setting school-leaving exams．”，末段进行总结，概括全文，由judging the ability of schoolleavers和university graduates可以判断，此处说的是要需求方来确定标准，故[C]为答案。
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