Discussion

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

PROFESSOR CUSENS, Paper 6

The question is often asked: is there any relationship between A level grades and degree performance, and it is rarely answered satisfactorily. It leads perhaps to a second question: is there any relationship between degree performance and career? My reply to the first question is that the average performance of those of a given entry is related to their average A level rating, but the correlation for an individual is much less certain. Perhaps this is no bad thing; life would be very dull if some geese did not turn into swans. The second question is even more difficult to answer -there is never likely to be a perfect correlation between degree performance and career because of the many factors of chance, human psychology and so on which can profoundly affect a career pattern. However, I see on my forays into universities and polytechnics a marked increase in the monitoring of what I can only describe as engineering talents, in addition to the conventional exercise of written examinations. In general there is a perceptible move towards degree assessments which are more realistic predictors of the graduate's engineering career.