This. I have long argued that schools should optimize teaching and learning, not double in being certification authorities. The current scheme just devolves into a lot of stress for the students and selection according to school "prestige" because grades between schools are not comparable. It is also extremely stressful for students which is not optimal for the learning process.
Learning should be about wanting to acquire knowledge, not being forced into it like tuna in a tuna can factory.
well, the general expectation is that people receive a certification of some kind at the end of their study. i mean over here i have seen "graduation from kindergarten" being treated with a ceremony that makes you think you had just received a university diploma. rather ridiculous if you ask me.
but what is the alternative? every university employing their own tests would mean that students now have to prepare for multiple tests based on where they apply.
a job interview system? lot's of bias and unfairness in that too.
in germany school prestige is irrelevant for the university selection process, only the raw grades matter. so actually your best chance to get good grades would be to pick a school that has a tendency to give students better grades.
however if those statistics are not known, as they won't be now in singapore (and i don't know if they are in germany) then your school choice is either random (with respect to learning outcome) or based on perceived reputation of being a "hard" or "easy" school.
there are a number of other statistics that probably need to be suppressed too, such as the number of students that get into university from each school.
> but what is the alternative? every university employing their own tests would mean that students now have to prepare for multiple tests based on where they apply.
Not necessarily. In many EU countries that I am familiar with, there is
a standardised, country-wide test which all universities use as their main
admission method and which is managed by an entity independent of high schools.
Note that this is different from continuous testing throughout the duration of
the program. Still, some universities administer their own admission tests in
addition because you can't force the university to use only a single scoring
method (well, you can't, but it's not necessarily a good idea).
Even so, each university solely administering their own admission tests is how
it used to work in the past and it worked rather well, despite being a bit more
cumbersome. In the end, if you had real knowledge, it didn't matter that you
had to take a few different tests.
> a job interview system? lot's of bias and unfairness in that too.
This does not matter. It just means each business is responsible for its own
hires and the only one suffering from a bad hiring process is the business
itself. If certain employee qualities lead to an objectively better work
performance (and there are surely such qualities), the process will very
quickly correct itself to detect those qualities.
It's hard to tell without more context, but it sounds to me like you're
conflating criteria based on grades (which are continuously accumulated
throughout your schooling years) and admission/certification tests which are
only administered once, at the moment you are trying to attain some
certificate. My position is that the former is a bad thing, but the latter is
necessary and closer to testing the thing that matters: your final abilities.
the problem with a nation-wide standardized test is that it pushes highschools to train students for that test. that causes quite some damage to the real education that they should be receiving. in china the outcome of their standardized test is that the students in the best universities tend to be excellent test takers, but not at all good students otherwise. so i am very skeptical that a standardised test will be good in the long run.
education should be available to everyone. the only requirement to enter any level of education should be to have passed the previous level.
as for grades vs test, i haven't much thought about that at all. i was merely reporting on how the german system works, without necessarily believing that it is the best system. all these systems are flawed in some way, and in the long run i believe the only system that will work is the one that allows everyone to access university level education.
with more and more university level material becoming available online for free this will eventually become reality. we just need to figure out a way to scale learning and teaching process
Learning should be about wanting to acquire knowledge, not being forced into it like tuna in a tuna can factory.