Educational transitions in the UK are related to social background characteristics such as social class and, to a lesser extent, ethnicity and gender. This thesis presents a case study of admission to the University of Oxford to understand why, conditional on application, admissions patterns into selective higher eduction in Britain show an advantage for already privileged strata of society. Specifically, net of attainment, the professional middle class, white, male and state school applicants fare particularly well in securing offers for undergraduate study at Oxford. With the exception of the state school effect, the admissions privilege advantages already privileged strata of society. In the first empirical section, the analysis of purposefully generated survey data on 1,929 applicants for admission to the University of Oxford finds that quantifiable measures of merit fail to fully explain differential admissions patterns. The logistic regression models also uncover that while applicants from the private sector initially have similar gross chances of gaining an offer to their state school educated peers, they actually face a penalty in the selection process when taking into account their higher levels of prior academic attainment. Furthermore, the analysis shows that while measures of cultural capital, motivation, aspiration and learning style are meaningfully related to selection decisions, they do not explain the lower transition rates for ethnic minority applicants, those from non-professional class backgrounds, female applicants and private school applicants. The second step in the empirical investigations then aims to understand the generative mechanisms behind these findings from the perspective of the decision makers in the selection process. This section draws on interviews with 25 admissions tutors and the observation of eight admissions meetings. The analysis here finds that selectors view the admissions exercise as involving risks and uncertainties. Also, many participating tutors routinely considered schooling in their selection decisions and discounted the performance of applicants who had come from very high achieving schools but who were not top achievers within this peer group. The mechanism of homo-social reproduction in decisions involving uncertainty is then put forward as a possible explanation for the unequal transition patterns. Finally, the third empirical analysis section investigates links between degree performance in final university examinations and admissions relevant factors. This section includes the degree performance of Oxford students as well as those who subsequently embarked on their degree course at universities other than Oxford. The most striking finding is that among the Oxford graduates, female and private school students are less likely to achieve first class degrees than their male and state school educated peers. One interpretation of this finding is that the discounting that selectors apply in the admissions process for these applicants is not only justified but may not even go far enough. But it is also possible, in particular with regard to the female effect, that the Oxford study environment or the examination system, or both are more conducive to male achievements. This thesis contributes to sociological theory by showing that existing models of educational transition have paid insufficient attention to the role of gatekeepers and their individual preferences in generating aggregate selection patterns. Incorporating selectors as actors in transition models increases our understanding of unequal access to educational institutions and the challenges faced in striving towards equal opportunities in an education based meritocracy. The findings presented here have implications for other fields of sociological inquiry that need to account for the role of individual decision makers such as labour market research. The work presented here has implications for policy making regarding selection processes within the University of Oxford and British higher education more generally. It could also aid university systems such as Germany, that are moving towards selective admission, to think about the challenges of designing truly equitable selection processes.

This thesis focuses on the problems of the Chinese University Admission (CUA) system. Within the field of education, the system of university admissions involves all of Chinese society and causes much concern amongst all social classes. University admissions have been researched since the middle of last century as an issue which has economic impact. However, little attention has been paid to the CUA system from the perspective of economics. This thesis explores a number of interesting aspects of the system. As a special case of the priority-based matching mechanism, the CUA system shares most properties of the Boston Mechanism, which is another example of a priority-based matching mechanism. But it also has some unique and interesting characteristics. The first chapter will introduce the main principles of the CUA system in detail and discuss stability, efficiency, strategy-proofness, and other properties under different informational assumptions. There is a heated debate about whether the CUA system should be abandoned or not. Educational corruption is one of the issues that have been raised. Corruption is a major issue of the CUA system as well as university admission systems in other areas in the world, e.g. India, Russia, etc. We contrast the performance of markets and exams under the assumption that there exists corruption in the admission process. The problem will be analyzed under perfect capital markets and also under borrowing constraints. We use auction theory to obtain equilibria of the market system and the exam system and analyse the effects of corruption on the efficiency of the two systems. We conclude that the exam system is superior to the market system if we only consider the issue of corruption. In the third chapter, we construct a model to reveal the forces that positively sort students into different quality universities in a free choice system under assumptions of supermodular utility and production functions. Given a distribution of student ability and resources, we analyse the planner's decisions on the number of universities and the design of the "task level" for each university, as well as the allocation of resources between universities. Students gain from completing requirements (tasks) in universities, while having to incur costs of exerting effort. In contrast to previous literature, our model includes qualifications as well as cost in the student's utility function, and educational outputs depend on qualification, ability and resources per capita. Our main focus is on the design of task levels. Our result differs from the literature as regards the optimal number of colleges. A zero fixed cost of establishing new colleges does not necessarily result in perfect tailoring of tasks to students. Furthermore, if the fixed cost is not zero, then the planner has to take fixed costs into account when deciding the number of universities.

The problem of this study was an analysis of the scores made on selected standardized tests used as one part of the procedure for admission to the teacher education program at North Texas State University. The students involved were enrolled in their first professional course in education.

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This research responds to the problem of minority teacher under-representation within North America’s increasingly diverse urban school systems. It weaves together what is known about educational equity, teacher education admission policy, and policy implementation to explore the research question, “How did equity-based admission policy shape candidate diversification in an urban Canadian teacher education program?” The conceptual framework grounds this study within organizational culture and describes how culture both shapes and is shaped by interactions between structure and agency. The conceptual question asks, “How did institutional norms and individual will work to support or constrain equitable candidate diversification?” Data collection occurred during private interviews with members of three organizational groups: Policymakers, policy implementers, and policy beneficiaries. Policymakers were senior administrators with several years’ experience in their respective positions. Policy implementers were admission personnel, ad hoc faculty, and field-based educators. The policy beneficiaries were candidates who self-identified as future French and Physics teachers, and as members of Aboriginal, Disabled, Gendered/Invisible, and Racialized/Visible minorities. Data analysis was an iterative process of applying demographic, thematic, and editorial coding to the interview transcripts. Discussion highlighted several themes that shaped the admission process: External admission policy context, Faculty of Education Equity Policy, admission policy instrumentation, qualification precedence and weighting, academic qualifications, non-academic identity-based and experience-based qualifications, admission policy gaps, and last-minute Policy disclosure. It also addressed admission personnel recruitment, training, and performance during candidate personal information form assessment. Significant findings emerged in the areas of preservice program partnerships, candidate support services, qualification transparency, labeling of identity-based candidate characteristics, and admission personnel training. Research applicability extends to consecutive and concurrent teacher education programs, other tertiary professional licensing programs, and multi-site qualitative research projects. Recommendations for policy and practice target teacher education admission, policy implementation, and equity policy development.

Thesis (M.Soc.Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1984. / Also available in print.

This dissertation examines recurrent patterns in the interaction between psychiatric patients and the systems of knowledge and power that constitute them as patients. These patterns are traced both in the historical migmti::m of patients into and out of the asylum, and in the language used by doctors and patients to account for such migration. Transcripts of interviews with patients and case notes written by doctors are subjected to new forms of quantitative analysis and this is used together with qualitative interpretation to reveal the ways in which disciplinary power operates through confession and surveillance to constitute psychiatric subjects in the tension between freedom and incarceration. / Psychology / D.Litt. et Phil. (Psychology)

Preliminary designs for the cylinder heads of Scania’s next generation Diesel Engine have been investigated by the means of PIV measurements on a steady test rig. General structures present in the flow have been investigated, with a specific focus on Swirl motion due to its well documented impact on combustion efficiency and pollution generation. The first set of measurements was acquired in the tumble plane. A method to perform efficiently PIV measurements was introduced, which consists in rotating the experimental setup rather than the PIV measurement instruments. As a consequence, a considerable amount of work is saved and a great number of measurement planes can be acquired. This method has allowed to reconstruct a 3D3C picture of the flow in the cylinder. Such 3D3C direct measurement of flow in a test rig cylinder had not been reported previously in the literature, as far as the author is aware of it. The second set of measurements was acquired in the swirl plane. General patterns in the swirl velocity fields have been identified. The author introduces the hypothesis that shifting down the measurement position may, to some extend, be equivalent to observing the flow evolve in time in the real engine situation. Measurement performed far enough under the valves exhibit clear and stable swirling vortex structure with the cylinder heads investigated. This may explain for the validity of the combustion models used in the industry that, despite apparent over simplification of the flow situation, have proved in good agreement with engine tests.

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