I watched the Bank of England video and quiz on a website called LadBible. I wrote about this here last week.
The video is about 2 minutes long. Forty seconds is dedicated to a discussion of a Roman Mosaic on the floor of the Bank of England. The rest involves a youngish woman asking a youngish man whether it is worth saving or not. He says it always is, apparently, whatever level of income you have.
Then there are four questions, as I recall (you cannot go back once you have done the quiz, or I would have screenshot them). One, at least of the questions, is on a topic never touched on in the video. It asks what the role of the Bank of England in saving is, to which the answer is that it sets interest rates. If anyone was relying on the video as a source of information, they would not have known that.
To indicate the standard of those questions, one was very close to this:
A person saves £100 for five years with 2% annual interest being paid. At the end of fives years how much money do they have in their account?:
- £100
- £102
- Less than £102
- More than £102
That was it.
I am not sure what value this is meant to have.
I am also worried that it has come out on a website called LadBible. Is that a misogynistic choice by the Bank?
Either way, this is crass if this is the level that this reaches. Dumbing down is rarely evidenced better than this.
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What value is it meant to have?
Clearly, it is intended to keep young people ignorant about money so that Chancellors can lie to them about where it comes from.
Did they test it on financial journalists first?
What is that answer to that £100 saving question? It’s got me stumped.
Signed,
Rachel Reeves (joke)
🙂
As soon as I discovered that they need both my mobile phone number and my email address before I can enter the competition, alarm bells rang. Why do they need both? Their privacy policy seems to suggest they can use the information for multiple purposes. Also, why is the Bank of England in bed with what seems to be a completely commercial web site? The whole thing stinks!
It does
To answer the question properly the amount would be £110.51 after 5 years. The answer to the question as described in the blog, is obviously – More than £102
Or more generally:
£100 * ( 1 + 0.02 )^5
As per the “compute total amount” section here: http://www.embeddedlinuxtestengineer.com/Interest_Rates.html
And btw the answer is £110.41 😉
Technically depends if the interest is paid away like many savings accounts are . So £100 would be in the account after 5 years. Maybe Mr Bailey doesn’t know this from the ambiguous question
That is not what they presumed.
Nor did I.
Ands it’s hard to submit a note to the examiner in a mutiple chocie exam.
Can you imagine the meeting that was held to authorise this?
I can.
God help us…………………
And what about the sales pitch that closed the deal? It must have felt like shooting fish in a barrel. Clearly the BoE had no idea what they were buying!
The BoE seems to be trying to do “public engagement”. I’ve got myself onto an email list or some sort of ‘panel’ (and am invited to a focus group type of event in a couple of weeks time) and recently received a quiz or survey from them. It wasn’t quite as awful as this Ladbible quiz, but was pretty vacuous.
I wonder if they have some new marketing and communications people who are trying to build a new “brand BoE” – cool, friendly,…?!
Or it’s obfuscation, half-truths (or whole ones) smoke and mirrors, masquerading as ‘education’?
My entry point was a friend who pointed out a BoE post on Facebook.
They do these ‘consultations’, but they turn out to be akin to propaganda spreading