Wednesday, July 02, 2008 

Snobbery? On my internets?

Most would agree that the worst threads on Comment is Free occur beneath every posting on Israel and Palestine, as the interest groups on either side flock via Google Alerts or GIYUS to commence battle whilst boring everyone else to tears. There are other posts that attract high amounts of criticism, and excluding ones by radical feminists, which usually deserve it in spades, it almost always seems to be when the person in question writing is below the age of 30. This was true of the Max Gogarty meme, who although a poor writer and son of a hack hardly deserved the scorn which was poured on his head from all across the internet.

Enter Majid Ahmed, a state school student from Bradford who achieved 4 A grades at A-level, but who unfortunately was convicted of burglary when he was 15, on the basis of which he had his offer of acceptance to study medicine from Imperial College London rescinded. Having admitted his mistake, in which he was a bystander rather than someone who participated in any actual robbery, most would accept that shouldn't bar him from a place on a college course. The crowd on CiF of course has other ideas:

But would I want to come to you with my health problems? Probably not.

Majid - you sound self-pitying.

A mixture of "how clever am I!" bragging and self-indulgent whinging.

Very typical of emotionally immature teenagers, of course.

Someone with so little judgement as to hang out with the wrong crowd in the first place, let alone break into someone's home, is not innocent and is no way mature enough to be a doctor.

People respect others who admit their mistakes. Admit you did something utterly stupid and screwed up. Your whining that you were tricked into it sounds like a six year old kid who has been caught nicking sweets.

You claim your guilty plea was an attempt to preserve your family's pride...nope, not buying it, how is a criminal conviction less bad than going to trial and being declared innocent?

Given that entry to medical school is so competitive, Imperial have every right to withdraw the offer. Throwing a public trantrum that it's not faaaiiir proves them right.

Grow up - you are not entitled to anything because you want it, or even because you worked hard for it. Study something else at uni, and if you really still want to be a doctor in a few years when you've grown up a bit, apply for graduate entry. It may not be the career for you anyway.


OMG what a story of woe. How can anyone keep banging on, with a straight face, about how they have overcome such hardships only to be stopped by some terrible snobbery.

This may surprise you matey but lots of people grow up facing hardship and gain good results and have to struggle to make good. However what they don't do is burgle a house and then bitch about how their conviction is proving a barrier.

Often people living in tough conditions have those conditions made much worse by their bad neighbours who break into their houses and make tough conditions tougher.

To be honest I don't want to visit a doctor who has served time in jail for crimes they have committed.

I find it crazy that you feel like a victim, rather than hold up your hands and admit that your poor choices have led to this situation. The real victims are the people who have been subjected to your dishonesty. Get over it and stop bitching.


You ask whether the outcome would be different had you hired professionals to draft your appeal - but you can write an article for the Guardian - are you being funny?

You claim you were goaded into breaking the law by friends, then you claim you were innocent but pleaded guilty. How you dealt with the police and the criminal justice system showed no sense of personal integrity. You chose immorally in breaking the law and then chose immorally again in pleading guilty while still considering yourself innocent.

There is no word of any sense of personal shame or of reform, only whinging in this article.

One of the lovely things I have found in working with many young Asian men and women in deprived backgrounds in their profound understanding of right and wrong, which is picked up in the family. This seems to have passed this candidate by.

The place will go to someone who was too busy studying to get a criminal conviction.

I am pleased that Imperial withdrew their offer of a place.

I spend a lot of time in hospital with a chronic and serious illness. While I am there I often see and talk to medical students on the wards as well as junior doctors. I don't want to consider the possibility that any of the people that the hospital lets loose on the wards have criminal convictions. Patients are often in a very vulnerable situation and the hospital staff as well as student doctors, nurses and physios etc must be beyond reproach.

You made a bad decision at 15 and now have to live with the consequences. You say that you didn't know you had no right of access to the dwelling but that you did know that they were a bad crowd - this should have been a major clue about their "new chill out pad" and as a dwelling is another term for someone's home I think it is clear that you knew it was not the home of one of your friends.

You seem very adept at working the cultural minority angle. Saying you didn't want the shame of your mother accompanying you through the courts so you had to plead guilty. Nonsense! If you were innocent of the charge then going to court to prove these would have been far less humiliating for your family than having a son who is a convicted burglar.

Get over your false sense of injustice. Medicine is a hugely competitive course and many students with four or five grade A 'A' levels and without criminal records get rejected for the course. Further, many people grow up in impoverished circumstances and successfully pursue their dreams without either burglarising someone's home or blaming everyone but themselves for their own stupidity. And, as for nothing in your life having been easy? Well, you seem to manage self pity with great ease.

Thank you Imperial; you make the right decision.

This is the most self-pitying trite I have ever read.

1. You committed a criminal offence. You were convicted of that offence, You have to live with the consequences. The fact that your background was perhaps tougher than others is irrelevent. We are all equal before the law.

2. You choose to make this a class issue, and attack the children of professionals. My children may have had what you would describe as "advantages", but don't you dare try and turn them into a burden for them.

3. How, precisely should universities be "accountable"? There are plenty of reasons not to admit people - not being good enough, not being pleasant enough, dare I suggest being a convicted criminal.

You urgently need to grow up, give up the self pity and realise just because you have played a bad hand well, the ride is not easy from here on in. Perhaps you could start by working for a year and making some form of compensation to the person or persons whose property you burgled.

Criminals demanding the right to be admitted to a particular university. Just whatever next?


Snooty individuals on CiF not acting like vindictive cretins, perhaps?

There are of course a few lone voices like this ahem, rather sensible chap:

Majid, ignore all the sour and bitter people on here that seem to think that committing a criminal offence when you're young and stupid ought to preclude you from having something resembling a life for the rest of your days; most of them probably did things mightily similar to you at the same age but didn't get caught. Re-applying to another college is a good idea however, as Imperial clearly aren't interested in your potential and only see you as a potential liability.

And we of course wonder why the youth of today are how they are.

Labels: , , , , , ,

Share |

7/02/2008 11:47:00 PM | | | links to this post

Thursday, August 16, 2007 

Moving on up.

It comes round every year, as predictable, regular and tedious as Big Brother. It features the same fresh-faced young things, joyful and excited at first, only to later sink into the black pit of misery of realising that your care-free days are almost over. It could only be the perennial argument about whether A-Levels, GCSEs, SATs, etc are getting easier.

It's also something of a schizophrenic argument. While we worry that A-Levels are getting too easy, we also find ourselves questioning whether our 14-year-olds are thick; with a third still failing to reach level 5 in English, Maths and Science. They can't both be right, can they?

Well, no. Neither exam is getting easier, and the reasons for the fast increasing number of A grades collected by 18-year-olds and the failure of 14-year-olds to get to the right key stage level are in fact highly similar.

Firstly, the reason for the increasing amount of awarded top grades at A-Level is mainly down to phenomenon of teaching to the test. Out the window has gone any real attempt at look at the background to the subject in question, or anything else that doesn't actually feature in the exam, and in has came the constant repetition of the "key facts", and the writings of essays around topics and subjects which have previously come up. This is all very well for getting the certificate stating how brilliant you are, but it takes all the joy out of learning, and makes for quick forgetting of everything you thought had been drilled into your brain. The private and grammar schools have got especially good at doing this, hence their hegemony over the A grades their pupils have.

Secondly, by the time most teenagers reach the sixth form, those who have lost interest in learning or who are doing more vocational rather than academic subjects have moved on, leaving behind the more aspirational who actually do want to achieve something. This is why the plans by Alan Johnson to extend the compulsory leaving age to 18 are so wrongheaded: while it may have good intentions, it's unlikely to improve results and may even have an effect on bringing them down. This is also partly the reason why the SATs results still look comparatively poor: the teaching to the test has yet to have been perfected for them yet, and there are far more of those who are disruptive and or simply disinterested to care. This is not to blame them, or suggest they're a lost cause, rather that the system of testing and targets has comprehensively failed.

This is where Tomlinson's report into the reform of the 14-19 system should have came in. It would have brought together the opportunity to take both the vocational and academic route, rather than having to done one or the other as is more or less the case now. It would have also have vastly cut down the numbers of exams, helping to reduce stress while if anything increasing the knowledge that universities and employers would have had about those requesting places or jobs. Labour, naturally, rejected it.

Teenagers then aren't getting dafter or smarter, they're both taking and losing an respective advantage at the same time.

Labels: , , ,

Share |

8/16/2007 09:03:00 PM | | | links to this post

About

  • This is septicisle
profile

Links

Last posts

Archives

Email me
Syndicate this site (XML)
Powered by Blogger
and Blogger Templates