Mary Curnon-Cook, Ucas chief executive, said this summer had been “perhaps the most competitive year for higher education admissions in the last 10 years.”
On Thursday night the number of different courses available through clearing almost halved from 32,000 in 2009 to 18,000.
Bristol and Nottingham universities reported that they had no remaining places, while instututions including York, Royal Holloway, Loughborough and Queen’s University, Belfast said a number of courses had filled up.
Essex University said a number of its most popular courses, including economics, politics and modern languages, were full by early afternoon.
Reading University had no vacancies for British or EU applicants, but was still offering vacancies to overseas students due to there being no cap on international student numbers.
Kingston University reported that more than 40,000 attempts had been made to call its clearing and confirmation service by 1pm, while Bath University said it had 19,000 applications for 3,000 places.
For the second year in a row, San Francisco schools have slightly closed the gap in state standardized testing scores between black and Hispanic students and their peers.
As the students in San Francisco Unified School District filed back into class Monday, the state released the scores that schoolchildren across California received on the standardized tests they took in the spring.
The exams are intended as a barometer of progress for schools, districts and the state as a whole. Schools that do not show progress in their test scores can face penalties or closure.
English and math teachers who took professional development courses online improved their instructional practices and boosted their subject knowledge scores, producing modest performance gains for their students, report Boston College researchers in one of the first large-scale randomized experiments to study the impact of online professional development for educators.
As teacher performance comes under increased scrutiny, the findings point to online professional development as a powerful option to improve teacher quality, according to the report from the Technology and Assessment Study Collaborative, a unit of BC’s Lynch School of Education and its Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation and Educational Policy (CSTEEP).
“A series of online professional development courses that focus on specific content and target student learning needs can have positive effects on teacher knowledge and instructional practices,” said Boston College Associate Professor of Education Laura O’Dwyer. “The st Full Post…
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Both the University of Minnesota and the Minnesota State Colleges and University systems are embarking on searches to find their next chief executives. In an era of low budgets and high expectations, the job of college president might be tougher than ever. What does it take to be a creative, effective, innovative college president in the 21st century?