Where no criteria or relationship exists, perhaps the
easiest option is testing. If an incoming student is
able to net high scores against benchmark prerequisites,
then this will be considered satisfactory for granting
access to next level courses. When students from
school X consistently pass test Y, that's when a
database equivalence might be entered, such that
future credit transfers happen automatically.
This system in some ways mirrors what's happening in
cryptography. If you're a trusted source, then you
authorize others, who likewise join a circle of
trusted sources (as referrals). So if I know nothing
about school Z, but have a close relationship with
school M, which refers Z, then I may add entries to
my database such that transfers from school Z to mine
go smoothly, with a minimum of testing.
But testing is worth setting up, because you get
walk-ins, homeschoolers, people without a lot of
"official" transcript credits, but who have been
hitting the books and self-tutoring, and perhaps
doing so effectively. My school will administer
a battery of tests and confer credits accordingly,
in recognition of a student's level of accomplishment,
regardless of whether I have access to transcripts
from other schools (sometimes transcripts get lost,
or the schools in question have gone out of business).
Of course testing can be expensive, so it happens that
consortia get together around a testing center which
specializing in administering equivalency exams. These
are not just your typical GED, SAT or IQ tests, but
course-specific, designed to generate a transcript
"from scratch" if necessary, for a student having no
previous academic history on file. Given that my
school is part of consortium A, I entrust the local
testing center to make referrals, much as I trust
school M.
Corporations are instituting similar screening, in
order to tap the homeschooler market, or to assure
quality across several regions of operation, as
when Hewlett-Packard recruits programmers from
Oregon, USA and Bangalore, India. If you have no
uniform global credentialling system (and we don't),
then you need to either (a) institute your own
testing centers or (b) partner with other corporations
to endow testing networks which will apply your
company criteria uniformly, and in the language of
the local area if you don't have any corporate
policies requiring this or that competence (in
programming and mathematics, it may matter not at
all if a recruit speaks only Hindi, Japanese, Thai,
Cherokee or English -- thanks to unicode, our
computerized testing programs are getting better
at communicating in whatever lingua franca).
Given that a school may actually be a corporation,
and faculty employes of that corporation, it follows
that teachers and students are subject to essentially
the same screening and/or credit transferring process.
Of course in the USA we may have some national standards
database which facilitates smooth transferings of
students and faculty between any two accredited facilities,
and other networks of this kind may likewise make it
easy to exchange "credit currencies" elsewhere in the
world, but with "grade inflation" and "social promotion"
serious problems in many economies, would-be student
and faculty transferees are inevitably going to come
up against a testing center sometime in their career,
if they plan to move around a lot or change institutional
affiliations.
This is not necessarily a "bad thing" of course, as many
public school teachers are anxious to "cash in" on their
expertise as math-science teachers and join the ranks
of a corporate faculty, where the pay may be better, or
opportunities to relocate overseas superior. In some
cases, the pay is actually lower, but access to better
equipment (i.e. more recent technology) and to well-
prepared student bodies, eager to learn, more than makes
up for the pay differential. Plus given local living
standards, payment in local currency may actually represent
quite a good living potential, even if the income registers
lower than one's previous income, as paid in the (possibly
inflated) native currency of the region from whence the
faculty recruit is joining us.
Kirby
Curriculum writer
4D Solutions
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