The Social and Demographic Characteristics of Direct and Delay Entry Nursing Students in Australian Universities

This national study compares the social and demographic characteristics of direct and delay entry nursing students in a earlier group of 1551 students in higher education programs (1987‐1990) with the national study group of 2295 students sampled in 1995. Using a specially constructed socio‐economic variable for comparison the analyses demonstrated a significant difference in the socio‐economic level of the household for the direct entry group but not for the delay entry group. There was also a significant difference between males and females in their direct and delay entry patterns. Further, there was a significant difference in the location of school attended for most of their secondary education for the direct entry group but not for the delay entry group. For both direct and delay entry students there was a significant difference in the number of siblings, the level of education attained by the mother and the income received by the mother in the households of the earlier and latter study groups.     

Markers of ‘Authentic Place’? The Significance of Degrees,Awards and Qualifications in the Analysis of Higher Education Systems

Although the power to award degrees lies at the heart of the concept of a university, neither it nor degrees themselves have attracted much scholarly attention.
The paper contends that award-conferment provides an interface of major importance between higher education and its environment; and that the awards themselves can serve as rich and informative (yet often coded) indicators of the relationship between the two.
For awards to be seen in this way, the paper argues, two conditions are required: the conceptual independence of awards in their own right has to be recognised as entities distinct from courses of study; and instrumentalist views have to be sufficiently prevalent to make it meaningful to treat an award as specifying a set of purposes and intended outcomes (that is to say, as an 'end'potentially achievable by various 'means'). These conditions, it is suggested, only tend to arise in particular social circumstances, specifically those of mass higher education.
Having illustrated these points by considering certain changes of usage in the terms used for higher education awards (degree, qualification, etc), the paper concludes with a tentative sketch of a framework by which to analyse the various ways in which awards might contribute to the workings of HE as a system.     

Mass Higher Education and the search for standards: reflections on some issues emerging from the 'Graduate Standards Programme'

This paper sets out to explore the meanings and implications of academic standards in mass higher education. It attempts this in the context of the rapid expansion that has recently taken place in the UK. In doing so it draws on, and examines, selected themes that have emerged from the Higher Education Quality Council's 'Graduate Standards Programme' (though it does not attempt to give a full account of the findings of that work).
It begins by discussing some of the implications of the ways in which UK HE has become a mass system. It then moves on to consider the roles of explicitness and professionalism in the establishment and assurance of academic standards, and their relationship to issues of public accountability. Having explored the possible tensions between professionalism and accountability, the paper questions whether it is helpful to frame discussions of standards in terms of a notional opposition between subjective and objective. It concludes by proposing another way of conceptualising standards, and discusses their possible future development in UK higher education.     

Parallel realization of systems,using factorizations and quotients in categories

A general theorem concerning the parallel representation of systems is proved, using the also general notions of terminal factorization situation and quotient in a category. Applications are given to the decomposition and synthesis of a number of kinds of systems.     

Searching a biomedical bibliographic database from Bulgaria: the ABS database

BACKGROUND: The University of Sofia, Bulgaria, disseminates local biomedical literature (1994 to present) through a free online database, ABS. OBJECTIVES: Our objectives were to systematically search ABS, identify citations to controlled trials and discover what proportion of these studies are to be found on medline. METHODS: We searched using Bulgarian and English phrases; manually selected citations of controlled trials and sought these citations on medline. Results: Using the two languages, we found a total of 628 unique citations, 47 of which seem to be relevant controlled trials (precision 7.48%, 13% of ABS citations were found on medline). The trials in ABS commonly focused on evaluation of care for people with cardiovascular or urological problems. DISCUSSION: ABS is another source of easily accessed trials not readily available elsewhere.