Stephen Tall has an article over at Dale & Co on the Hughes Report on Access to Higher Education, which he previously outlined here on Lib Dem Voice.
Stephen comments:
However, there is one recommendation in ‘The Hughes Report’ with which I take issue:
It is my firm view that interviews which are conducted by an academic who will end up teaching that particular student are too subjective. … interviews should be conducted by trained admissions personnel who will not have face to face teaching responsibilities for the interviewee. (p.33)
It’s an odd comment for two reasons. First, it seems Simon Hughes believes tutors in those handful of universities which conduct interviews will automatically favour certain types of candidates — yet he produces no evidence to back up this conclusion. Such an assertion without corresponding facts is what migtht be termed, to coin a phrase, “too subjective”.
The second reason it’s odd is this: let’s take the parallel of the workplace. Is Mr Hughes seriously suggesting he’d be happy to recruit a member of his parliamentary staff without interviewing them himself? Does he really think that only trained HR personnel should conduct interviews on his behalf to ensure proper objectivity? I don’t believe for a moment he would agree to such an arrangement. Indeed, I imagine Mr Hughes would take it as a slur on his professionalism for it to be assumed that he would be incapable of objectivity when recruiting his own staff.
Interviews are, it’s true, an imperfect and flawed method of selection — for anything. Mistakes are made. But I would never hire someone to work for me based solely on their covering letter and CV. How else, other than in a personal interview, can I test an applicant’s passion for their work, or measure their true potential? Nor would I want to leave it to an HR officer, however good, to probe their specialist knowledge of my professional expertise. And I’m quite sure that the potential employees I interview like the oppotunity to size me up, and judge for themselves if they want to work with me. Interviews are a two-way process.
There’s something else important about an interview: when you make your choice of candidate you are making a personal investment not only in them, but also in your judgement. And that provides a very powerful incentive to ensure you do everything in your powers to support them, including when you make a mistake.
Simon Hughes is by no means the first person to argue that tutors cannot be trusted to interview the students for whom they will be responsible for three or four of their most formative years. However, it isn’t simply the double-standard — tutors’ interviewing skills are subjective, employers’ are objective — which I find troubling; also troubling is his belief that the admissions system needs to be outsourced in order to eliminate personal contact between tutors and applicants. Not only does that betray a fundamental lack of trust in the professionalism of tutors, it also drives a wedge into their ability to forge a rewarding relationship with their students.
Read Stephen’s full article at Dale & Co.
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13 Comments
Actually, yes HR professionals should be more involved in overseeing the recruitment process for researchers and assistants to members of parliament. That might make it less likely that they recruit members of their family.
I’m not sure what Hughes point is. When we’re taught at university we’re in class sizes of up to 200 people. Labs and more specialist modules can number a dozen or so, but I still doubt any lecturer is going to think “I couldn’t bear to spend any more time with him, he’s a defiantly a no”.
The problem comes when you’re dealing with Oxbridge College admissions, since they will be far more concerned about how a students personality effects their model societies.
Good on Simon Hughes for challenging Oxbridge on their intentionally exclusive recruitment methods.
I do not trust Oxbridge tutors to interview professionally. Their failure to do so up to now is evidence enough.
I would insist that they scrap the interview system altogether, but Simon’s suggestion to professionalise and standardise it seems like a good one.
A 17 year old coming out of a comprehensive school really can’t be expected to be able to talk in an academic one-on-one situation. It is a specific skill, and something that requires practice to do. But isn’t covered in the curriculum. Most pupils leaving comprehensive schools will have never been in that situation before. And how could they, with class sized such as they are? The only schools that do have the resources to prepare children for Oxbridge interviews are private and public schools — who put a lot of effort into Oxbridge entry coaching.
This means that ‘academic interview skills’ have become a class indicator. Being able to extemporise on academic subjects has become a stand-in signal for ‘has the resources and class background to prepare for our unusual game’.
Selecting someone for a job and selecting them for a place at university are wholly different things. There are no parallels to be drawn. Simon Hughes makes a sensible point. Very odd article.
@LeeT: “Actually, yes HR professionals should be more involved in overseeing the recruitment process for researchers and assistants to members of parliament.”
More involved? — yes, absolutely. The only ones involved? — no, of course not.
@Francis: “I do not trust Oxbridge tutors to interview professionally. Their failure to do so up to now is evidence enough”
Any evidence for this, or is it simply a knee-jerk assertion? All the data shows that applicants from state schools are just as likely to be admitted to Oxford as applicants from independent schools. The real problem is in persuading state school applicants to apply in the first place (which isn’t helped by repetition of old-fashioned stereotypes and prejudices).
@AndrewR: “Selecting someone for a job and selecting them for a place at university are wholly different things. There are no parallels to be drawn.”
Really? How so? Both involve significant leadership/mentoring/pastoral/legal duty of care responsibilties. Are they exactly the same thing? — clearly not. To say there are no parallels, though, is in itself more than a bit odd.
No, I would not hire someone without interviewing them. In fact I see all new recruits personally. The reason I do that is to make sure that new members of staff will fit in with the existing culture, and with my plans for the future. That is exactly the same reason that Oxbridge colleges base their recruitment on short interviews, but in their case it is not a legitimate reason.
The recruitment process should be independently run. The best candidates should be chosen through an open assessment centre, with published results.
The present selection process allows lecturers to choose the people they would like to teach, they should be required to educate the most able candidates.
A good article.
“The present selection process allows lecturers to choose the people they would like to teach, they should be required to educate the most able candidates.” I used to be an Oxford interviewer: the people we most wanted to teach were the ones we judged to be most able. Why would we want to select anyone else?
We don’t interview at LSE, where I now teach, but academics set criteria for admissions staff that allow them to select the people who are most able to study our courses. I don’t see a lot of evidence that one system works better than the other, although I can tell you that Oxford interviewing is exhausting work, and I am glad that I no longer have to do it. It isn’t fun rejecting large numbers of people, whatever their backgrounds.
“The present selection process allows lecturers to choose the people they would like to teach, they should be required to educate the most able candidates.”
And why on earth would they not want to educate the most able candidates?
Do people really think Oxbridge academics would rather select someone rich and thick, rather than someone poor and bright?
Surely with a market based approach which Universities lobbied for the prospective student is the customer. Thus they should act as the interviewer and the tutor the interviewee. In that scenario an HR type generic staff member will have little to offer.
Alistair – with the high demnand for Oxbride places, it’s not going to work like that. As Tim Leunig has already pointed out, the biggest problem for Oxbridge interviewers is that they have to reject so many able people.
However, I work at a university lower down the food chain which also does interviews (interviews by academic staff for prospective students). And for us, the interview definitely is more of a sales pitch than a selection process, since we are rarely in the position to reject people anyway. The main aim is to get students to choose us above the other four institutions most of them will have applied to.
I wonder whether this will become more common – it does work as a marketing tool if it is done in a friendly and competent manner.
But Oxford and Cambridge won’t ever be in that position!
As a former University lecturer who was also (jointly) responsible for admissions, I only have a personal perspective on this comment thread. Perhaps the academic in me regrets that I did not have time then to read the literature on selection processes – so any thoughts here are my own and are more subjective than objective.
We were mostly confronted by application forms showing good GCSEs and straight A predictions at A-level (which they often did not achieve…). As we needed to keep within our number allocation, we were dependent upon their additional written comments to try to pick students who would benefit most from our courses.
However, we did interview mature students with apparent potential, in order to ensure they would be able to benefit from the course. One I particulalrly remember, was offered a place if he could get a C at A-level. He got a D. But we still gave him a place on this basis of his potential. His maturity enhanced the whole year, he achieved a First Class degree, followed by a Ph.D. and, in my last years returned as our External Examiner.
Hence, I am sceptical that exam results should be the only method of selection. Both exam results and interviews have flaws, so why insist on only one approach?
As a former University lecturer who was also (jointly) responsible for admissions, I only have a personal perspective on this comment thread. Perhaps the academic in me regrets that I did not have time then to read the literature on selection processes – so any thoughts here are my own and are more subjective than objective.
We were mostly confronted by application forms showing good GCSEs and straight A predictions at A-level (which they often did not achieve…). As we needed to keep within our number allocation, we were dependent upon their additional written comments to try to pick students who would benefit most from our courses.
However, we did interview mature students with apparent potential, in order to ensure they would be able to benefit from the course. One I particulalrly remember, was offered a place if he could get a C at A-level. He got a D. But we still gave him a place on this basis of his potential. His maturity enhanced the whole year, he achieved a First Class degree, followed by a Ph.D. and, in my last years returned as our External Examiner.
Hence, I am sceptical that exam results should be the only method of selection. Both exam results and interviews have flaws, so why insist on only one approach?
Haven’t read the report yet but I disagree that the University admission process is easily comparable with a job appointment process.