British educational trajectories from school to university: evaluating quantitative evidence in policy formulation and justification

Abstract

General rightsThis document is made available in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite only the published version using the reference above. Full terms of use are available: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/pure/about/ebr-terms 1 British educational trajectories: school and degree performance and the potential implications of changing the post-16 school examination systemBritish university admissions officers have used applicants' results at two sets of public examinations (normally taken at age 16 and 17 respectively) to assess their suitability as candidates for degree courses. In 2013 the UK government abolished the second set, arguing -with data -that this would not hamper the admissions procedure. Using the same data, analyses employing a novel procedure falsify the government's arguments: many well-qualified students for courses in the country's leading universities may not be offered places there in the absence of data on their academic progress during their two years of post-secondary education.key words university admissions * school examination performance * university degree performance * contingency tables

Age, sex, qualifications and voting at recent English general elections: an alternative exploratory approach

“…With these, extracting robust -and interpretable -estimates of interaction coefficients is difficult, indeed sometimes technically infeasible. The approach developed here -set out in full methodological detail elsewhere (Jones et al, 2015Johnston et al, 2015Johnston et al, , 2016 -avoids those problems while providing clear indications of the patterns within a relatively large data set -although even with over 20,000 observations and a contingency table comprising only three independent and one dependent variable the problems of robustness remain.…”