My daughter has Uni peers who were heavily coached to achieve the HSC marks to get into their medicine course, who are now satisfied with marginal pass grades because at the end of the course, that is enough to get them their medical degree (very cynical approach to life IMO).
I think that there is definitely more of a relaxed approach to getting through uni if you don't need your bachelor degree to feed into a competitive masters program (or graduate medicine). I am sure the first year direct entry med students are all exhaling...But they will need to be competitive to get the specialization they want, to varying degrees depending on what that is, so I imagine the effort for grades will come back. And we are certainly of the impression those students doing a bachelor degree on the way to a competitive graduate program need to be working very hard to get in... We'll see in a few years I guess.
We are totally derailing this thread though :-(
WRT to the extremely competitive tests to get into opportunity classes, for each of the maths, English & aptitude tests, there are 35 questions per paper with 30 minutes allowed. Success requires extremely (almost ridiculously) tight time management for kids as young as 8. It is in this context that I make the observation that many schools are really cautious about arranging for extra time. I suspect that if they allow 45 minutes for each paper, the make up of these classes would be different - more students with innate abilities who haven’t been coached (OC & SS teachers have confided these same suspicions to me). Therefore, I favour less time restrictions, but generally there has been little resistance to restrictions because contrary to sifting out the really top students, it gives others a better chance because improved speed is more amenable through coaching than other facets of intelligence.
Now that is a peculiarly NSW issue... and to a limited extent in some other places. And does make it clearer to me why NSW are more draconian about typing and extra time compared to some other states. Or the IB for that matter, the IB board are very reasonable.
