Yesterday and today, in my little corner of my little institution of higher education, we performed an annual rite that reflects not that well on either the ancient or the modern in British academia and says much about what is right and what is not with higher education here today. Yesterday and today we had the Awards Boards; meetings in which we decide what degree classifications students get for their three or four years of, depending on the individual student, hard, moderate, little, or no work. First, let me clear, every year I’m immensely impressed with how enormously conscientious everyone is, academic and administrative staff alike, at ensuring that everything in this process is fair and proper. Barring personal disasters out of their and our control, students really do get the degrees they deserve, given the way the system is. The only problems with that statement are that the system is mad and is getting madder all the time. Here’s why. As most people know, degree classifications in this land of ancient traditions fall into four categories, or classes as they’re tellingly often called: third, with average results in the 40-49 percent range; lower second (2.2), 50-59 percent; upper second (2.1), 60-69 percent; and first, 70 percent or higher. There are also Certificates and Diplomas of Higher Education, Exit Qualifications given to those who cannot complete their degrees for whatever often real or sometimes stupid reason, but these are by definition not degree classifications. Anyway, that’s four degree classifications—as opposed to 60 classifications if we did away with thirds, seconds, and firsts, and simply awarded students the average percentage that the aforementioned classifications are based on anyway (60, rather than 100, because below a 40 percent average is a fail). We could also have many more if we retained a decimal place or two as well. I can only suppose we still have this third-second-first-class system because we have always had it. But many graduate employers and university Vice Chancellors want rid of it and that, in my opinion, would be a good modernisation. But there are other forms of modernisation are that are making this ancient system even more senseless.
One of them is that, like schools, hospitals, police constabularies, and other hitherto non-business-based public services, British universities are being forced to adopt all sorts of business ethics and practices. One of these is that we must compete with each other. Of course, to some extent universities have always competed with each other for students, for the best students, and for general academic reputation. Yet competition has hitherto never been so avid as to prevent us providing services of broadly comparable standards and thus combining a healthy degree of competition with a broader objective of collectively providing the best system of higher education we can for as many students as we can as efficiently and as cost-effectively as possible. Today, however, with student fees set to rise precipitously, with already-existing league tables correspondingly set to become yet more important, and with the ever-increasing embedding of business and management talk and practice in higher education, including the very real threat of universities going out of business, there is more at stake than ever before and competition will get fiercer than ever before—to the point that the University of X must prove that its services, especially its degrees, its ultimate “product”, are far better and indeed not comparable at all with those of the University of Y.
One of the main areas where we must compete, and one which appears prominently in league tables, is in degree classifications. Universities (all of them, not just mine) are ever more anxious to instruct their employees to increase the number and proportion of their students getting 2.1s and firsts. There are, to be sure, different ways of doing this. Presumably, we’d all agree that the best way is for us teachers to improve our teaching and assessment. And we try constantly to do that and I think with great success. We are highly regulated for precisely this purpose and in my experience a good nine out of ten of us are highly conscientious about these things anyway. An alternative or additional way, though, would be artificially to inflate students’ grades. Now I’m not saying that is what we’re doing, and indeed Vice Chancellors have assured ministers and Parliament that were are indeed doing no such thing. Pretty much all universities have adopted versions of the following, though. First, there is a “banding” system wherein, for the purpose of calculating average overall marks for degree classification, students’ worst second-year course marks count once, their best second-year marks and worst third-year marks count twice, and their best third-year marks count three times. Second, there is a “window of opportunity” system wherein students within two percent of the classification boundary will cross the boundary and get the higher degree classification if either half of their course marks are in the higher category or their final-year average is the higher category. I’m not against these things: I’m all for putting greater weight on students’ performances later in their careers to reward those who have worked hard to learn more and develop more intellectually, and the hardest-working students benefit from this the most. But when does rewarding diligence turn into artificial grade inflation? Potentially pretty quickly in a context of increasingly fierce competition.
We may go some way to avoiding artificially driving up grades and thereby in a very real way driving down standards by dumping the archaic class system of thirds, seconds, and firsts, and adopting simple percentages instead. Not only would that make degree classification a far more precise and therefore fairer and more useful representation of a student’s achievement, but it would become far less tempting for us to alter those all-too-conspicuously-crucial boundaries artificially. Of course there would remain some temptation for every university to have their students by some means or other scoring higher percentages than other universities. The only way to combat that, though, is to roll back some of the business ethics and practices that have been pushing public service ethics and practices against the wall and thoroughly beating them up, rather than existing alongside them in productive partnership. But that’s another matter altogether.
