I see The University of Auckland is having trouble comparing qualifications from 18-year-olds, indeed it has decided it is too difficult and is opening the doors to anyone who’ll pay (and who has some kind of university entrance qualification) for some courses. It’ll do the weeding at the end of the first year.
I remember there was some discussion around this when I was working in the British tertiary sector. It was believed (from the institution I was in, a university) that the polytechnics more or less did this – you could probably get in regardless of your A-level grades, but they were much more stringent about passing you from Year 1 to Year 2. In our lofty ivory tower we believed that if the university was going to accept fees, it had to have a reasonable expectation that the candidate had a chance of passing the exams. That meant that we had to exert some level of caution before accepting anyone. And of course there are limits on how many you can take; in the extremely competitive race for places in British tertiary institutions, any university that stuck its head above the parapet and announced it would open to any A-level or equivalent holder would have been utterly swamped.
We don’t have that level of competition here, at least, I have not heard a single story of a student who was unable to get into the institution of his/her choice, let alone one who was not able to get into any tertiary institution. It’ll be interesting to watch The University of Auckland (they’re very precious about that initial T) and see whether this method is rolled out to their other courses.
