Advocates of using a US-style SAT for university selection claim that it is fairer to applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds than achievement tests because it assesses potential, not achievement, and that it allows finer discrimination between top applicants than GCEs. The pros and cons of aptitude tests in principle are discussed, focusing on school-proofness claims, concluding that it is invalid to assess suitability for university using measures purportedly immune to study, and unfair to allocate opportunities according to qualities acquired by chance. Considering empirical findings, aptitude tests' claims to school-proofness and their power to predict academic achievement -relative to achievement tests -are found wanting. Methods of evaluating pupils' achievement within an educational context are discussed, including a national system for ranking university applicants that accounts for absolute achievement and educational context. Pupils' ranks would form the basis of universities' first sifts, allowing applicants from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds to compete fairly for university places.

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General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) and General Certificate of Education (GCE) grading standards are determined by Awarding Bodies using procedures that adhere to the Code of Practice published by the regulator, Ofqual. Grade boundary marks (cut scores) are set using subject experts' (senior examiners) judgement of the quality of candidates' work, informed by statistics about the candidature and the mark distribution of the examination. This model has been called weak criterion-referencing: the requirement of (strong) criterionreferencing for evidence of specific knowledge, skills and understanding is relaxed to allow for variations in examination difficulty, requiring maintenance of only the general quality of examination performance. This paper considers the major conceptual flaw in this model -the fact that the examiners making the judgements have insufficient information to estimate quantitatively the relative difficulty of two successive years' examinations -as well as evidence demonstrating that experienced examiners are unable to distinguish between candidates' work within a small range of marks, as is required to set grade boundaries. Furthermore, examiners appear biased toward giving candidates the benefit of doubt when deciding grade boundary marks. Combined with their imprecision, this is a recipe for 'grade inflation' -the lowering of the quality of work required for a particular grade -of which the steadily increasing national GCSE and GCE results, and the consequent need to introduce grade A ⁄ s, could be a symptom. It is proposed that a form of cohort-referencing that is sensitive to changes in examination entry patterns be introduced. The proposed system would shift the weight of evidence toward statistics, using qualitative judgements as part of a check on the veracity of the statistics, at the same time extinguishing the annual debate as to whether increasing examination outcomes are an indicator of improvement in education or a decline in examination 'standards', and safeguard against the need to introduce further higher grades in the future.

Forty-five pigeons were studied in a detour problem. The pigeon was facing food reward but was behind a wire screen. A 3 X 3 design was employed in which degree of hunger and problem difficulty were varied. Increased deprivation improved problem-solving monotonically and for each level of problem difficulty studied. No evidence was found for the Yerkes-Dodson law, which states that the optimal level of motivation should vary with problem difficulty. The Yerkes-Dodson law has been confirmed often with aversive motivation; the present experiment was the first attempt to test this law by varying task difficulty in a problem involving alimentary motivation. THE PRESENT STUDY INVESTIGATES the effects of deprivation upon problem-'Research supported by NSF Grants GB-3626 and GB-6659.