It's nice to be famous....and misused
Found out this morning, courtesy of a phone call from a very confused jobseeker, that for quite a few years we've been used as the basis for recruitment into the UK TA and regular army without our knowledge!
Check out
http://www.armyjobs.mod.uk/howdoijoin/canijoin/Pages/EntryRequirements.aspx. Look under the qualifications section.
Explanation: I work for something called the ALIS project at the University of Durham. ALIS = A-Level Information System. Amongst other things, we analyse performance data for schools and colleges at the post-16 level, ASs, A-Levels, IBs, BTECs etc. The project's been running for about 25 years.
The qualifications the army's after appear to be 35 'ALIS points' to qualify as an officer.
The problem is....there's no such thing as 'ALIS points', and never has been.
After spending the morning on the phone to the Army Careers Office (who were none the wiser, but could confirm that they'd been using the term for at least 10 years and that 'ALIS' did refer to the A-Level Information System, they were hopelessly confused when I said "I'm calling from ALIS":p) the nearest we can figure out is....way back in the mists of time, before there was an official numerical scale for GCSEs, the A*=8, A=7, B=6 etc scale was used informally. Eventually this was adopted by UCAS and later superseeded by A*=58, A=50, B=42 etc (don't ask me why). But since we were openly using the scale in data we sent to schools, the MoD started referring to it as these mythical 'ALIS points' - and it seems they've since arbiterally adopted it as some kind of conversion for non-GCSE subjects.
So, in theory, we could sue the government for.....what, copyright infringement? Misrepresentation? Misuse of research data?
But we won't of course. You don't sue people who have no money.
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