I could be cynical but no, literacy is the key to most social policy, and literacy is a much bigger problem in the UK than many admit.

In one department alone - the veterinary faculty - 73 of the 628 students were investigated for allegedly copying or fabricating material... Many of the students were made to resubmit their work, although only one was ultimately failed by the faculty.

There are only two ways to crack down on plagiarism: failure and expulsion. As long as you don't make students pay, and believe me students know exactly what they can get away with - this is not 'ignorance', most this is straight out cheating - they will always play the system.

Once you start expelling students [or making them repeat the whole academic year, after paying a hefty re-registration fee] then they'll stop cheating.

The point that these articles repeatedly miss is that refusing to deal with cheating [which is effectively what this institution is doing] is most harmful to the students who actually do their work. And to the institutions themselves - a University which doesn't take plagiarism seriously isn't worthy of the name.

Ah, the joys of living in Scotland...

Translation: assuming that degree standards have held firm [and are roughly comparable across UK universities, as is supposed to be the case...], Heriot-Watt has fewer very good and excellent students than many other universities...

Translation: he [the student] had to take notes because he [the student] hadn't done the preparatory reading etc.. If he'd done the reading he'd already be familar with 80% of the lecture material and wouldn't need to be taking 'complete' notes.

The rector is elected by students to represent their interests...

But it wants to go further and impose even higher fees for medical courses because so many English students come here to study medicine then return south, leaving a shortage of doctors in Scotland.

While I hate to ever admit that 'student' leaders are right [particularly as the National Union of Students - the NUS - doesn't even represent all universities, not to mention all students...] if the Scottish Executive was really concerned about admission rates of English students in particular courses surely they could just have a wee chat with SHEFC, the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council about it???

After all, the odds that English students would come up to Scotland to do a law degree and then move back to England does rather beggar belief [as the English and Scots have separate legal systems].

The real issue is that some Universities orient their medical schools more to English students than Scottish students, and as the English and Scottish school systems are markedly different this is a serious structural disadvantage Scottish students face.

PS: I wonder when everyone who's so upset about the lack of dentists in Scotland will start asking questions about why the University of Edinburgh was allowed to shut its Dental School in the early 90s...?

Two fundamentally opposed ideas, both true. If you give out Firsts [the 'top' degree grade in the UK] to the top 5% of students, and you then increase the number of students by 50%, logically you will be giving out 50% more firsts. If you're still only giving them to the top 5% though, your 'standard' for granting grades hasn't changed, hence "no deterioration in quality".

Given that your increase in student numbers has [generally] resulted in far larger numbers of relatively weak students, more students who would have got 2.1s will now be getting 1sts. And since many departments have decided on their own that they aren't giving out enough 1sts, the fundamental basis for UK degree classifications has completely changed over the last decade.

Bit late for that.

And where exactly is the story here? Isn't this what you would intuitively expect? Does the Guardian really think that people who do PhD's love academia? Haven't they heard of bills, mortgages, children?

Perhaps more to the point, don't they recognise that the UK's funding councils are explicit in their desire for PhDs not to stay in academia but to venture out into the real world?

It's not a wonder that so many leave academia, it's a wonder that so many stay in the first place...

It's interesting to sit on the subway surrounded by clearly nervous 17/18/19 year olds clutching their campus maps and campus guides and going through what must be completely incomprehensible course and program documentation.

If I didn't know any better I'd say I was feeling nostalgic...

But for a great bit of insight into what it's like starting out check out Aaron's Stanford experience - Day 2, Day 3, Day 4.

On one hand you have 27% of parents paying for extra tuition as they think so little of what their children are getting [and the Telegraph is right to ask if "improved" exam results are the product of good teaching or of extra tutoring].

And on the other you have the people who are paid to 'run' the educational system - a job that've manifestly failed to do, going by the lack of skills of students entering universities, bleating that they don't want funding from sources they don't approve of - see Tycoon's bid to save sink schools snubbed - as it would weaken their grip on the educational system:

The strategy, apparently, being to fail most students.

That being said, there are [and always has been] a number of students who are determined to fail all by themselves. It will always be difficult to develop a really strong educational system in a society where so many are overtly hostile to education.

But on the bright side, at least things aren't this bad. Yet.

Now, in a similar vein Universities also have huge managment problems, with a tradition of promoting the incompetent, being unable to identify and or recruit good managers, with a bizarre HR system that seems to be designed to ensure that administrators/managers cannot build a case for internal promotion through expanding their remits, taking on new roles, supervising staff etc.. And who designed the HR/promotion system UK universities use?

Yes, it was Hay.