Not only does Hogeschool Rotterdam test its students, it is also planning to ‘test’ its teachers. After having received many complaints from students about having to wait too long to get their test scores, the school will now evaluate its teachers based on the turnaround time for grading exams, according to De Telegraaf.

If a teacher takes longer than 20 working days to come up with a grade for any given test, they will be denied a raise at the end of the year, writes Algemeen Dagblad.

If you want to become a CEO or a supervisor of one of the 25 Dutch companies that make up the AEX, the index of the country’s most actively traded securities, you’d better study economics in Rotterdam or civil engineering in Delft, Z24 reports.

Together, both universities have produced the majority of current CEOs and supervisors of AEX companies. The oldest university of the country, that of Leiden, and the largest universities, those of Amsterdam and Utrecht, play lesser roles in supplying large Dutch companies with their management. Fifteen of the 25 CEOs are graduates of either Rotterdam (8) or Delft (7).

(Photo of the Berlage stock exchange by Flickr user Taver, some rights reserved)

Competence Factory, the job education branch of Randstad-based employment agency Appoint, has started to offer a course in developing Apple iPhone ‘apps’.

The training starts in September, and has separate courses for programmers, designers and marketers. It costs 5800 euro to participate.

The course’s web page suggests developing iPhone apps may be “the new gold rush,” but programmer Adam Martin has some sobering data. The median turnover of an iPhone app developer was between 1000 and 5000 USD in May of this year, although Martin doesn’t say whether this is for one app, for one month or year, or for an entire career. Some 10% of those polled said they had no formal training whatsoever, so the numbers for trained app developers may be more uplifting.

(Link: Bright. Photo by William Hook, some rights reserved.)

It doesn’t matter what media you read, any recent article about Dutch education tells you how really bad it is. One ex-teacher, Peter van Kranenburg, decided to do something about (read: cash in) and start, according to Dutch newspaper Trouw, the Netherlands’ very first private elementary school. Located in Bussum, North Holland, Florencius started today and has four students of 8 and 9 years old and seven staff members. It costs 12,500 euro a year, which is not cheap. Florencius is of course hoping for more students and plans to open more school in Arnhem and Haarlem.

If I am not mistaken, most Western countries have had private elementary schooling for ages. I wonder why it took so long for someone to be done here. Rules? Willpower? Embarassement? Starting any private venture is usually proof that when money is put into something, it makes things better.

I went from a high school with 2,500 screaming students to one with 125, not counting the 25% that get kicked out for bad behaviour in the first year. What happened?

(trouw.nl)