Devalued qualifications

Every year at about this time, when results for the UK's major secondary school exams are announced, there are worries that the tests have been dumbed down. Overall pass rates have been rising inexorably for the past two decades: more than 97% of students taking A-levels (equivalent to US or Canadian Grade 12) achieve a pass, and so many now achieve the top "A" grade that a new "A*" ranking has been introduced to help universities to select the best candidates.

There have been similar trends at the "GCSE" level (roughly Grade 10 equivalent), and this year brought a new and dubious record. A girl named Deborah, from east London, passed GCSE mathematics -- at the age of FIVE! Well done to Deborah -- but just whose idea was it to stage this stunt? Was it a teacher determined to prove that the exams have been devalued? That's unfair and disheartening for the large number of students for whom GCSEs represent an important achievement. After all, it's not the students' fault if the exams are easier than they used to be: the kids can only take the exam that's put in front of them.

Or maybe Deborah was egged on by a pushy parent. In that case, you have to wonder if any thought was given to how the poor child would feel if she failed the exam, as she almost did -- she achieved an "E" grade, the barest possible pass, which means she'll probably have to take the exam again at some point in the future. Getting Deborah to take the exam has done nothing for her, unless of course the whole point was to get her name in the papers, which can't be ruled out as a motivation for almost any kind of behaviour these days.

Meanwhile at the other end of the groves of Academe, we find lovable "Dr Doom" Nouriel Roubini going off on one at the expense of his inferiors. Nouriel, who has parlayed his fifteen minutes into an enviable gig as a media pundit and party animal, has decided that he now knows all the answers, and he's not putting up with anyone who dares disagree. Here's one of a series of amazingly arrogant Tweets from a couple of days ago:

"Keynes was 100% right: 7 of 9 academic/econometric studies of fiscal stimulus prove it worked. Hacks w/o PhD shut up"

There's a lot more like that if you care to check Roubini's Twitter account -- @Nouriel. (Oh and, "7 of 9"?? Wasn't she a rather fetching alien in one of the later Star Trek series? Just who is Nouriel partying with?).

Denigrating the qualifications of anyone without a PhD is certainly a lot more ambitious than devaluing GCSEs, and Roubini can expect no mercy next time he gets something wrong -- Hell hath no fury like a journalist (or, for that matter, a blogger) bitch-slapped. Thing is though, anyone who's worked in finance in recent years will be all too aware that PhDs played a substantial role in generating the financial crisis. The simultaneous arrival in dealing rooms, a couple of decades ago, of legions of PhDs and unlimited cheap computing power gave the world all those CDOs and CDSs that got us into the unholy mess that Roubini now makes good money pontificating about.

Evidently, having a PhD is no guarantee that you'll show sound judgment in the real world, something that Roubini, as a close student of financial markets and an active teacher of postgrad students, ought to know well. He must also know that years from now, some new economist will come along to tear up rewrite many of the things that today's academics believe: who knows, it may even turn out to be young Deborah.