Abstract

Higher education in the UK is pressured to widen participation due to the social justice issues of mobility and movement through the class divide. However, those from lower classes and mature students elect for qualifications that do not classically allow entry into university, for example, the Business and Technology Education Council (BTEC) and Access to Higher Education (AHE) diplomas. A solution to this is a university bridging programme. Such a programme was analysed as to whether it prepares different cohorts of students effectively for undergraduate programmes, that is, those who have just missed the entry qualification but are coming from Advanced level qualifications, the other coming from nontraditional entry routes. Data from one academic year were anonymised and analysed. Results indicated that students coming from courses designed to widen participation scored significantly lower on the programme than those coming from Advanced level awards of any subject. This indicates that vocational and returning-to-education qualifications fail to prepare students for academia due to being focussed on the outcome, rather than the objective, of learning. The study also questioned entry tariff point equivalency. Those with higher points and nontraditional qualifications performed worse, suggesting that entry points cannot be used prognostically. Tariff points are a system to translate traditional grading systems into a numerical form which then allows for easy comparison between students. Varying qualifications have differing grading systems, and tariff points are used to enable the conversion of these grading systems to a universal one.

摘要

由于流动性和跨阶级流动的社会正义问题，英国的高等教育面临扩大参与的压力。然而，那些来自低年级和成熟学生的学生选择传统上不允许进入大学的资格，例如商业和技术教育委员会 (BTEC) 和接受高等教育 (AHE) 文凭。一个解决方案是大学衔接课程。分析了这样的课程是否为本科课程有效地准备了不同的学生群体，即那些刚刚错过入学资格但来自高级资格的学生，另一个来自非传统入学途径的学生。一学年的数据被匿名和分析。结果表明，来自旨在扩大参与度的课程的学生在该计划中的得分明显低于那些来自任何学科的高级水平奖的学生。这表明职业资格和重返教育资格未能使学生为学术做好准备，因为他们关注的是学习的结果，而不是学习的目标。该研究还质疑进入关税点的等效性。那些具有较高分数和非传统资格的人表现更差，这表明切入点不能用于预测。关税点是一种将传统评分系统转换为数字形式的系统，然后可以方便地在学生之间进行比较。不同的资格有不同的评分系统，