Re: "Self-Criticism and Ruthless Exposure of Their Own Shortcomings" --- V. I. Lenin Mandated
That seems to be what happened with this year's exam rankings in the UK too. Teachers were forced to rank children in their classes and not allowed to have "ties", thus there would always be one and just one person at the top of the list, and likewise the bottom and every position in between, even if two children were in fact working at exactly the same level. This made it possible to have a precise distribution of grades, even if in reality the distribution varies year-to-year.
When you hard-code this sort of thing there are always going to be undeserving losers and undeserving winners. A classic example would be the Eleven Plus exam (or at least, the 11+ as it was 40-odd years ago - I have no experience with the system as currently run in the backwards parts of the country :-), where the grammar schools had a fixed number of places available so in some years, children who in other years would have scored well enough to progress to the grammar, didn't, and in other years vice-versa.
The thing that's confusing me is that while I have long disagreed with the whole principle of the 11+, I can see that if you wish to have a streamed school system you need to have some kind of at least semi objective filter. In the workplace I really can't understand what on earth the benefit is of forcing the bottom 5% of your workers out on a regular basis, particularly if they are actually working well and meeting targets. I can actually see some big disadvantages.
M.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
