Today's announcement of reforms to the way students apply to university in the UK will be welcomed by many as a step in the right direction.
Bill Rammell, the higher education minister, is surely right in principle to say that a system where people apply after getting their A-level and Highers results is fairer than applying on the basis of grades predicted by their teachers.
The danger is that the half-way house he set out today is going to confuse as many young people and their families as it helps.
The idea is to give students who do better than predicted at A-level a second chance to apply to a "better" university - Oxbridge, say, or other elite institutions like the London School of Economics, Bristol or St Andrews.
The aim is to help working class students who tend to be given lower predictions and may not have the confidence to aspire to the most prestigious degree courses.
They will have a week to do so while still hanging onto any existing offer of a place. This means that over-subscribed universities, such as those in the research intensive Russell group or the 1994 group, will have to keep back a number of places for late applicants.
Given that every year these universities reject thousands of students predicted to get three A grades at A-level and it is easy to see the sort of minefield admissions tutors will be asked to enter. And for students who find the Ucas system confusing at the moment, is a further complication really a good idea?
Independent schools are already prickly about possible discrimination against their pupils by universities looking to improve their working class intake. That is one factor in the growing number of applications to American universities from British public schools.
The National Union of Students condemned the move as a missed opportunity, saying it was extremely disappointed that a full post-results system was not being introduced.
Mr Rammell hopes the arrangements he announced for 2008/09 will pave the way to full reform of the system - a post-qualifications admissions (PQA) system in the jargon - by 2012. As he says, 55% of predicted grades are wrong.
University vice-chancellors at first welcomed the idea of a PQA system but their enthusiasm rapidly cooled. The Russell group of the 1994 group argued that a mere 300 students a year were disadvantaged because most of the wrong grades are in fact too optimistic. State school pupils benefit from the current predictive system, they argue.
Today's compromise is the work of Sir Alan Wilson, director general for higher education in the Department for Education and Skills and highly respected former vice chancellor of Leeds. But it still sounds messy to me.
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