The dropouts

STUDENTS STUART MACLURE

At this time of the year upwards of 40,000 eighteen year olds are waiting to know if their 'A' level results are good enough to get them into the university in October. By the time the Universities Central Council on Admission —the clearing house—has finally matched the last suitable candidate to the last available place, more than 50,000 students will eventu- ally be admitted. This means 50,000 young

people about to savour the delights and satis- factions of undergraduate life. It also means that 7,000 young people are now preparing to enter the university stakes who—statistically- can expect to crash before they clear the final fence.

It is tempting to dismiss the whole topic of undergraduate failure in British universities

with a stiff upper lip. It may be unfortunate but

there can be no success without failure. This accords with the natural prejudice of those who

have spent the formative years of their lives passing examinations. It is indeed remarkable how difficult it is for anyone who has rather enjoyed the experience of the occasional public examination (in which success was reasonably assumed) to comprehend the distress of those who are not among nature's chosen examinees and whose minds and bodies react to impend- ing examinations with the physical and psycho- logical symptoms of stress.

The University Grants Committee's recent survey showed that the failure rate has re- mained fairly steady at around 14 per cent. About 11 per cent of this was said to be due to 'academic failure' and the remainder to other causes, including illness, marriage, pregnancy and so on. It is not clear how far this can be taken at its face value. 'Other than academic failure' is responsible for the withdrawal of many more girls than men. But there is no way of knowing how far academic failures themselves are the result of 'other than academic causes,' such as those listed by Dr C. J. Lucas in a recent article in The Times Educational Supplement about the 10 per cent of students who suffer more or less severely from pre-examination panic.

A good deal of attention is inevitably claimed by the mechanics of the examination system. To some extent, at least, academic standards are notional and a high or a low failure rate is a measure of the examination itself as well as the quality of the students. Take, for ex- ample, the much higher failure rates in science and technology. It is the absurdly high wastage in these subjects—ranging up to the 40 per cent mark and beyond—which brings the average level up to the 13.3 per cent revealed by the UGC survey. In the arts, the academic failure rate is as low as 5.7 per cent. In medicine, it is lower still: 4.5 per cent. Well, you may ask, does this mean that engineering students (failure rate-20.1 per cent) are nearly four times as stupid as the arts men? Is the subject of study four times as difficult? Of course, it could be so. In terms of school qualifications, the arts students are better en- dowed; the engineers have been scraping the bottom of the barrel for some time. But it is inherently improbable that this ritual slaughter of the engineers—far worse at the technologi- cal universities like Loughborough and Brad-

ford than at places like Birmingham or Cam- bridge—reflects objective differences at all. It is more likely to derive from what might be called 'the custom of the trade,' on the one band, and examination techniques, on the other.

According to the ucc figures, which relate to the generation of students due to graduate in 1965-66, a high proportion of those who withdrew because of academic failure—especi- ally in the technologies—did so at the end of the first year. This would suggest that, at any rate till the early 'sixties, it was still the custom of the trade to admit 10 or 15 per cent more students at the beginning of the course than could be accommodated in the second year, and to use the first-year examinations as another stage in the selection process.

This is frowned upon all round and there is no doubt that strenuous efforts have been made to break this habit which should be reflected in the next ucc survey, five years or so hence. In presenting the latest figures, the UGC not unreasonably points out that the heaviest wastage was in institutions which had not achieved university status when the students whose progress was in question started their degree courses. No doubt they are mend- ing their ways. But what a high failure rate overlooks is the extent to which the students who reach the universities have already been sieved—by streaming in the primary school, by eleven-plus or common entrance, by '0' levels and 'A' levels, by the various grades within the 'A' level examination structure, by the division between honours and pass degree courses. The potential university dropout may be pretty moderate but, when all is said and done, be is among the top 6 or 7 per cent the schools have managed to bring on. There are quite good grounds for saying to the univer- sities—'here you are, make the best of him; don't throw him out just because you find educating him a more difficult job than you had expected.'

There is also reason to believe on statistical grounds that examinations in numerical sub- jects like science and engineering automatically tend to produce a wider spread of results than essay-type examinations in the arts and social sciences. There are more first-class honours and more failures in science and technology than in subjects where the examiner's subjec- tive assessment is more important and where he is more reluctant to give either an abys- mally low mark or an exotically high one.

Given any kind of examination system and a human nature in which the old Adam still lurks, what sort of failure rate could be re- garded as acceptable? What, so to speak, is par for the course? Presumably the answer is the minimum necessary to concentrate the minds of those who need some kind of ulti- mate scaffold to rescue them from the absorb- ing interests outside their academic work which it is also the job of the universities to provide. Oxbridge, Durham and Sussex all manage to plough less than 5 per cent without any evi- dence that academic standards suffered.

The first object clearly should be to get the failure rates down well below 10 per cent and to look closely at the techniques of assessment which artificially inflate the number of failures and add to the neurotic importance of the examinations themselves.

But in addition to this there are two other, related, needs. Those who fail should be given proper recognition for what they successfully complete before they leave university. This doesn't mean handing out a 'failed BA Bombay' all round. It means making sure that someone who fails at the end of three years has some kind of documentary evidence to show for the successful completion of the first two years. With this goes the urgent need to provide better links between the universities and other forms of higher and further education so that the man or woman who drops out of a university course can be adequately picked up—and at the level most suited to his talents—by a college of further education. Dr Nicholas Malleson, who has probably done more than anyone to highlight the personal and psychological con- sequences of the universities' occasionally ruthless and often unfeeling ways with under- graduates who fail, has tried with limited suc- cess so far to interest universities and local education authorities in a properly organised clearing house for unsuccessful undergradu- ates. In the light of its own evidence, the UGC should now take a direct interest in this and get something going on a national scale.