Moderation

At a certain well-known University in the SE of England, the academics in a science faculty have been required to return exam results, after marking, with averages over all candidates in the range 50% to 65%. This ruling is in the interests of "moderation" between the different courses of different difficulty, set by academics with differing agendas.

One can make a Reductio ad Absurdum argument here. Obviously, some students will be disadvantaged if they score less than the average on a paper. Why not require EVERY student to be given 55.7% on EVERY question on each exam.

But then, we don't need to set an exam, and can save academics' time and administration overhead.

But, if we are not going to assess the students, we can stop requiring them to come to lectures.

In that case we don't have to provide residential accommodation for them and they can live at home and study from the web and the books.

We don't then need the plant and infrastructure of the Universities, which can be asset-stripped and sold off to the private sector and the revenue ploughed back into the Treasury coffers.

The students will go back to learning from books, and resources like http://www.wikipedia.com/ and if they need advice from academics, the vestigial Unis can keep lists of those people willing to help by email and videoconference.