Friday 16 August 2013

What A-level reforms might mean for the sector

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Thursday 15 August 2013
Featured content
Remaking the grades
As A-level results are announced, Michael Gove’s plans for the exam’s fundamental reform draw closer to fruition. But will they endanger the traditional values he seeks to promote?
Hold bad news about grades until after NSS
Institutions consider a ‘range of strategies’ to win favourable scores from students
Academics: no one listens to us
Early results of the THE Best University Workplace Survey show that 40 per cent feel opinions go unheard
Stars of the sea
Academics who lecture on cruise ships may get a ribbing from colleagues, but they often have the last laugh
Unbelievable results? Not at all
We are getting stronger, healthier and better informed. Why shouldn’t exam scores improve? Gary Thomas argues
Arts
What Maisie Knew Directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel
To be released in the UK on 23 August

“The story unravels and rebinds in many of the same ways as the original novel, as Maisie is shunted between the residences of her irreducibly inimical parents, who themselves are less and less seen or heard as their replacements come to the fore. Maisie’s blurred awareness of the meanings of everything occurring around and beyond her is brilliantly translated into a cinematic medium of obscure or fragmentary or frightening sounds and sightsâ€

Rachel Bowlby on a modern retelling of Henry James’ tale of childhood curiosity and parental shortcomings
Books
The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural HistoryBy Emma L. E. Rees

“We know to condemn the Twitter trolling suffered by campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez, Labour MP Stella Creasy and academic Mary Beard, among others, but from Rees’ book, we know better the various ways in which female sexual organs and female sexuality have been the particular points of misogynistic attack for centuries, and the complicated ways in which our language continues to obscure, abhor and deny themâ€

Shahidha Bari welcomes a thoughtful look at ordinary anatomy and extraordinary anxiety
also in the magazine
• Asia slow to fulfil rankings promise

• Girls score higher than male coursemates on Ucas points

• Black studies centre aims to tackle academic whitewash
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