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International High School Comparisons:  IB, UK, USA, Australia, Canada.  Admission criteria for first year Bachelor programs at U. New South Wales (Australia)   US High School graduates do very poorly in comparison to those who complete Senior High School in other developed countries.  US High School graduates with aggregate AS scores of 9 are equated with the minimum level for entry to the least competitive of university courses in Australia.   Entrance to accredited psychology programs requires high scores on the IB.  US students without a high-scoring IB may be accepted with good grades in relevant IB-level subjects taken in the first two years of a College Bachelor. 

Radiologic Science Education in Australia.  An American perspective of Australian university education which lacks understanding of the system.  For instance, the article mentions that medicine will be upgraded to graduate status in 1997.  It fails to mention that the new post-graduate degree has been cut down from six to four years by the simple expediency of removing some of the material.  This makes it an inferior degree, not a superior one.  It does, however, equate with the US four-year MD – which is also inferior to the Australian undergraduate medical degree.   

Likewise, the author fails to note that the OECD statistics comparing the US and Australian tertiary systems are meaningless because they are not referring to the same things.  The statistics are based on ISCED codes which are supplied by educational departments in the countries concerned.  The ISCED guidelines are vague and interpreted differently by those providing the data.   DEST (Australia) categorises Level 6 degrees (substantial research degrees) as those which have a research content of 2-3 credit years (Australian PhD), while Research Masters (1-2 credit years of research) and Honours Degrees (0.33-0.66 credit years of research) are categorised as Level 5A degrees.  On the other hand,  NCES (US) categorises degrees which have a research content of 0.2-0.4 credit years as Level 6 degrees (US PhDs).   This avoids the embarrassment of admitting that the US does not offer a Level 6 degree.  It also avoids the embarrassment of admitting that NCES has little to no idea of the content of US courses.