Bring back Smith

Economics argue for cutting universities loose from government and allowing them to raise money through fees, for which students could borrow, either pri­vately or from the government. Fees would rise a lot. The government says that the current £1,100 fees cover a quarter of the cost of educating students. UUK says the real cost is higher, and the difference appears in the deficits that around half of Britain's universities are running. Sir Rich­ard Sykes, the rector of Imperial College, recently calculated that Imperial loses £2,800 annually on every undergraduate, and proposed charging the full cost, around £10,500, to students whose fam­ilies could afford it.

In its last manifesto, Labour promised not to introduce top-up fees, but Tony Blair is now believed to favour them - per­suaded, it is said, by Lord Jenkins, a former Labour chancellor of the exchequer, now chancellor of Oxford University. But other cabinet members, such as Gordon Brown, the current chancellor, are reckoned to be hostile. They fear that fees, even if intro­duced with a state-backed loans system, would put off poorer people.

If ministers shy away from this sol­ution, there is talk that some top universi­ties may decide to cut themselves loose, and do without government subsidy. Adam Smith would approve. He taught at Glasgow University, where academics were paid directly by students, and he thought the teaching was better in such universities than in those subsidised by the church or the state. A teacher's dili­gence, he observed, "is likely to be propor­tioned to the motive which he has for ex­erting it". Britain's universities have been subjected to socialist centralism for too long. It would be good to bring a bit of Smith back into them.

Ex.2.9. Translate the following sentences into Russian.

1. There was an especially big boom in the number of young people going on to higher education in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which has since levelled off: Tony Blair wants to revive it, and has set a target for 50% of 18-to-30-year-olds to ex­perience higher education by 2010

2. Some universities are looking to poorer coun­tries - South Korea, China, Eastern Eu­rope - to fill junior posts

3. the tendency of policy has been to erase or deny the differences between them

4. This tendency was most starkly mani­fest in the decision by the last Conserva­tive government, in 1992, to scrap the dis­tinction between universities and what were previously known as polytechnics

5. It is difficult conclusively to prove the no­tion that Britain's top universities are fall­ing behind their international counter­parts, such as Harvard and Yale

6. it is diffi­cult to compare the modular education of­fered in top American colleges with Britain's single-subject approach

7. British universities seem to be doing rather well. They still attract more than their fair share of foreign students.

8. By British standards, UCL has a vast research budget; but it is running a deficit and has lost academic staff to America

9. One of the stated aims of these changes was to improve access to university for less-well-off teenagers. But the wide gap between the proportions of students who come from the top social classes and the bottom ones hasn't shrunk

10. In mitigation…

Ex.2.10. Find in the article above the English for the following words and phrases:

1) переход от … к… 2) один из трёх 3) поставить цель 4) расходы на одного студента 5) снизиться на … % 6) увеличиться на … % 7) соотношение между студентами и преподавателями удвоилось 8) исправить положение 9) изучать огромное разнообразие предметов 10) отставать от 11) Нобелевская премия 12) лауреаты Нобелевской премии 13) надвигается кризис 14) страстный защитник 15) большое число отчисляемых (студентов) 16) отпугнуть 17) обходиться без правительственных дотаций (субсидий)

Ex.2.11. Find in the article above words and phrases which mean:

1. the effect or result of an action or event

2. sb/sth (with sth) (often passive) to cause trouble, pain or distress to sb/sth

3. without plan or order; random

4. unable to consider or plan for the future (first meaning – unable to see distant things clearly)

5. to manage sth wrongly or badly

6. (in sth) a sudden increase in population, trade, etc; a period of wealth and success

7. to come or bring back into use, existence, fashion, etc

8. to become worse in quality or condition

9. the combining of two or more commercial companies, etc into one

10. a sum of money given by an organization, esp the government, for a particular purpose

Ex.2.12. Fill in with words from the previous exercise:

1. What was the ___________ of your meeting?

2. Our company lost an important order because the directors _____________ the negotiations.

3. He was awarded a research ____________ by the government.

4. His health ____________ rapidly and he died two weeks later.

5. The government’s approach to the problem was ____________ and _____________ therefore not satisfactory.

6. Seeing her old friend again _____________ memories of her childhood.

7. She is ___________ (ie suffers from) arthritis.

8. The two companies are considering the possibility of a ____________.

9. The oil market is enjoying an unprecedented _____________.

10. Severe drought has ____________ the countryside.

11. Interest in this composer’s music has ____________ recently.

12. You can get a ___________ to repair of your house.

R eading & Speaking

Pre-reading questions

What is your opinion of exams?

Do you think exams are necessary? Why?

Can you suggest another way of testing students’ knowledge?

Ex.2.13. Study the words in the left column, find them in the text below, match them with their definitions on the right, and give their translation.

1) to exert	a) to be very surprised at sth, often admiring it very much
2) pernicious	b) a trick or habit of doing sth
3) to marvel	c) extreme or intense (also causing death; fatal)
4) pious	d) to take sth away from sb; to prevent sb/sth from enjoying or using sth
5) knack (of doing sth)	e) (infml) to produce a summary of sth; to leave out the parts of sth which are not important
6) aptitude	f) to use or apply a quality, skill, pressure, etc
7) mortal	g) threats or force used to make sb do sth
8) vicious	h) (derog) only pretending to be moral and good; insincere
9) to embark on sth	i) (fml) having a very harmful effect on sb/sth
10) to cram	j) to start or engage in sth new or difficult
11) to deprive sb of sth	k) (infml) to learn a lot of facts in a short time, esp for an examination or to teach sb in this way
12) duress	l) (infml) violent or severe
13) to boil sth down (to sth)	m) natural ability or skill at doing sth

After reading the text, compose your own sentences with the words above. Pay attention to the fact that some of them must be used in informal or formal speech: your sentences should be composed accordingly. Ask your group mates to orally translate your sentences from Russian into English.

Examinations exert a pernicious influence on education

We might marvel at the progress made in every field of study, but the methods of testing a person's knowledge and ability remain as primitive as ever they were. It really is extraordinary that after all these years, educationists have still failed to devise anything more efficient and reliable than examinations. For all the pious claim that examinations test what you know, it is common knowledge that they more often do the exact opposite. They may be a good means of testing memory, or the knack of working rapidly under extreme pressure, but they can tell you nothing about a person's true ability and aptitude.

As anxiety-makers, examinations are second to none. That is because so much depends on them. They are the mark of success or failure in our society. Your whole future may be decided in one fateful day. It doesn't matter that you weren't feeling very well, or that your mother died. Little things like that don't count: the exam goes on. No one can give of his best when he is in mortal terror, or after a sleepless night, yet this is precisely what the examination system expects him to do. The moment a child begins school, he enters a world of vicious competition where success and failure are clearly defined and measured. Can we wonder at the increasing number of 'drop-outs': young people who are written off as utter failures before they have even embarked on a career? Can we be surprised at the suicide rate among students?

A good education should, among other things, train you to think for yourself. The examination system does anything but that. What has to be learnt is rigidly laid down by a syllabus, so the student is encouraged to memorise. Examinations do not motivate a student to read widely, but to restrict his reading; they do not enable him to seek more and more knowledge, but induce cramming. They lower the standards of teaching, for they deprive the teacher of all freedom. Teachers themselves are often judged by examination results and instead of teaching their subjects, they are reduced to training their students in exam techniques which they despise. The most successful candidates are not always the best educated; they are the best trained in the technique of working under duress.

The results on which so much depends are often nothing more than a subjective assessment by some anonymous examiner. Examiners are only human. They get tired and hungry; they make mistakes. Yet they have to mark stacks of hastily scrawled scripts in a limited amount of time. They work under the same sort of pressure as the candidates. And their word carries weight. After a judge's decision you have the right of appeal, but not after an examiner's. There must surely be many simpler and more effective ways of assessing a person's true abilities. Is it cynical to suggest that examinations are merely a profitable business for the institutions that run them? This is what it boils down to in the last analysis. The best comment on the system is this illiterate message recently scrawled on a wall: “I were a teenage drop-out and now I are a teenage millionaire.”

Ex.2.14. Study the following piece and rewrite the short text below using words and phrases from it.

Before an exam you can revise or cram for it. If the exam happens every year, you can look at past papers. Some things can be memorised or learnt off by heart. But rote-learning [learning purely by repetition] is not sufficient for most subjects. It is also possible to use mnemonics [tricks that help you remember sth]. But tricks alone are not enough, and the best idea is to bury yourself in your books until you know the subject inside out.

When I’m preparing intensively for an exam, I don’t see any point in looking up exam papers from previous years, nor is there any point in just learning things by memory. I know some people develop very clever memory tricks to help them remember the material, but there’s no real substitute for re-reading and doing over the term’s work. It’s a good idea to have some sort of mind-map to organise your ideas, and memory-learning is useful, but in a limited way. At the end of the day, you just have to read a huge amount until you feel you know the subject 100 per cent.

Ex.2.15. Here are some idiomatic expressions about studying and exams. Use the context to guess what they mean and choose the right answer.

1 It's very easy to fall behind with your studies if you miss even just a few classes.

1. stay close behind other students

2. find yourself far behind other students

3. get ahead of other students

2 She seemed to just breeze through the exams. Everyone else was in such a panic and almost had nervous breakdowns.

1. do them calmly and efficiently

2. not take them seriously

3. cheat in them

3 I just can't seem to get the hang of English prepositions. Just when I think I've learnt them I make new mistakes.

1. memorise

2. understand

3. enjoy

4 When I sat down and looked at the exam paper my mind just went blank. Everyone else seemed to be writing away quite happily.

1. became confused

2. became very focused

3. became empty

Ex.2.16.

a) Fill each space in the text with either have, take or bring. The first (0) is given as an example.