Grade-inflation deniers

[GCandproud]

I’ve seen the latest article doing the rounds, saying that 38% of students now get first class degrees. A decade ago it was about 15%. Lots of academics are shouting that there is no such thing - students are getting clever, teaching is getting better. Here for example: https://twitter.com/leonievhicks/status/1525013871060197379?s=21&t=EHTHCDyBfD9iGEGGAWqT7A

Now I know that there are people who only really find their feet at university and excel despite not doing so before. But to assume that people falling into this category (as well as ‘improvement in teaching’, ahem) make up all the people with poor entry grades doing surprisingly well seems so misguided. Of course grades are being inflated. I’ve been at the exam boards where we are told to raise all marks by 10%, meaning that people who haven’t done any reading beyond the textbook are getting 2.1 grades. I’ve been told to give marks in the 80s and 90s, I’ve seen work that would have been a low 2.1 when I was at Uni (only in the mid 00s so not the dark ages) get given top marks.

As for better teaching? While I was taught largely by profs, readers, SLs and lecturers at my RG Uni, nowadays most of the teaching in our dept is by hourly paid GTAs and overstretched teaching fellows. I can’t accept that it’s better than in the past. I suspect the complete opposite. In some places, over recruitment has led to seminar groups of 30+ students. My students certainly don’t work harder than in the past either (it’s a miracle if they’ve done any reading), although for some of them that’s because they have to also work alongside their studies.

Why is there such a drive to deny that marketisation has led to inflated grades? Is it ego (I’m such a great teacher that all my students get brilliant marks)? Or something else? It just annoys me.

Hard agree here

Somehow we (the sector) have equated being student centred to providing value for money to our paying customers - so that our marketing department can attract more paying customers.

As you point out, the sector struggles to provide quality teaching and study skills support whilst at the same time widening participation. It's not that by any means I think WP is a bad thing - it can be transformative; however rather
than resourcing that support the easier and cheaper option is grade inflation.

I am often amazed at how many in the "university teaches you critical thinking" crowd apply exactly zero critical thinking to anything having to do with students and grades. It's as if students can never do any wrong and any failure is because of poor teaching, "the system", etc.
In my place at least we are now in an interesting situation, in that it is becoming clear that students are struggling to complete the same amount of coursework as past cohorts. In some courses we've had 50% of student with extension requests; it increasingly seems to be the norm to not bother starting fieldwork for your dissertation until 2 or 3 weeks before the deadline (or 3-4 days before for a normal essay), etc. I am holding my breath to see if this will result in the coursework expectations being objectively lowered (e.g. the university changig its own regulations so that a 20-credit course requires 3,000 words of assignments instead of 4,000 or something like that). No doubt we'd still have someone arguing that standards haven't been lowered but it is all about multiple literacies or whatever.

I can only say that over the years Ive seen many a graduate (teaching, police, health, social work) be unable to write fluently, with correct grammar and spelling.

Not all, but enough of them to wonder what on earth is going on.

I’m glad I’m not the only one! It doesn’t even make sense - these people constantly talk about a deterioration of conditions in HE, with people on precarious contracts being hideously overworked, yet we’re meant to believe that standards of teaching have gone up? Unlike school teaching, HE teaching requires zero training or qualifications in pedagogy. Are we supposed to think that all GTAs are just born with an inherent ability to teach? I also agree with the stuff about students being unable to do wrong in their eyes. It really sounds like they’ve bought into the whole consumer culture stuff, where the customer is always right. Unsurprising that the same people want to pass a UCU motion congratulating the Sussex students who bullied a staff member out of her job.

I agree too re this, thought it was just me!

In my School (RG uni) we took a decision about ten years ago to start raising the proportion of 1sts and 2.1s . It has gone from about 50% to about 75%.

Formally this was an acknowledgement that our entry requirements had increased substantially. Therefore our students were performing at a higher level and degree classifications should reflect this. In meetings I attended, bigger factors were that (a) our enrolments were declining relative to RG Schools with better degree statistics and (b) the major employers had started requiring a 2.1. Half of our graduates were ineligible. I think that the consumerist view of HE is the common theme behind both of these developments

Entrance standards are now quite high. Whether the current degree classifications reflect better performance is a different question. Informally colleagues seem to think not, but the uni wants to hear otherwise.

@poetryandwine is the increase in entry requirements larger than the inflation in A-level grades? (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_inflation#UK_A-Level_classifications_from_June_1989_to_2021)

I hard agree with you all so much.

I actually think that the top-top students have gotten better over the years. I mean the top 2-5% of students. I'm seeing third year undergraduate dissertations which are easily publishable and which are matching final year PhD work in terms of depth, quality, how articulate they are, complexity etc. No-one in my cohort was working to these kind of standards when I was a student. I was the second-best student in my cohort and my work was nowhere near what I see these days.

My reckoning is that the consumer-oriented university is helping these students significantly. The diversification of assessment types is helping them to find their 'groove' and building their confidence. The expansion of optional, research-focused modules is allowing them to explore different areas and find one that ignites their passion. The requirement that we offer formative assessment opportunities is giving them chance to try out their ideas and arguments. The requirement of office hours is giving them chance to meet with each member of staff and get additional support and feedback.

Outside of this 2-5% I don't see any improvement in the quality of students' work. Yet the proportion of higher class degrees has increased massively. I don't have the figures for my department but every year I'm told to shift my grades for my modules up by moderators. Even where I push back and only bump by, say, 3%, other colleagues are very generous.

I think 'effort' is being disproportionately rewarded in student work - so students are given disproportionate marks for attempting complex, difficult work even when the eventual end result falls wide of the mark.

I also see little attention being paid to simple things like spelling, grammar and proofreading. I understand that some students have dyslexia but, to me, academic writing still needs a basic standard. Mastery of where to use capital letters is one example.

@aridapricot raises an important point. It's not just about the quality of work but also what workload students can cope with. We had 60% of our dissertation students with extensions this year. 60%. It's madness and totally messes with our marking/feedback schedules.

I can't help but feel we're setting our students up for a fall, at least a very rude awakening in future

I agree with you @KStockHERO .
Something I don't think I'll ever be able to deal with, is how assignments which don't even respond to the assignment brief can be marked and get a grade (a grade which is not the lowest possible fail I mean). Say you ask students to write about Chaucer, someone writes on T.S. Eliot... "oh but the essay is not badly written and one of the marking criteria is good writing so they should get a pass". Or you ask students to apply paradigm A (which has been extensively discussed in class) to analyze a work, someone applies paradigm B... "oh but at least they've engaged with the work and see they say some interesting things". Why have assignment briefs in the first place then?

I think students work incredibly hard now because they are paying so much for their courses.

our kids are serious about their courses and hard working, don’t party, don’t drink and work part time, too.

we were far more frivolous because we weren’t paying.

I absolutely agree that grade inflation is taking place, though i'm surprised (and shocked) to hear of departments requesting blanket raising of marks. I presume this is an inevitable outcome of the ridiculous practice of student marks feeding into league table positions. I have no idea whether the actual quality of teaching has increased in recent years, it's not even an easy thing to measure. But, new starters here (RG) are required to complete the PG Cert in HE (or whatever its called now), so all but the oldest members of staff will have a teaching qualification eventually.

What's less often discussed in this debate is how student support has improved. I don't mean the actual teaching (contact time), but the additional learning-related support that students receive. We're required to provide specific learning objectives, detailed lists of recommended reading (basic and beyond), expectations for assessments, model answers, and even past examples of work marked at various levels. Universities also frequently have extra-departmental support available for maths, reading and comprehension, writing at University level, etc. None of this was available when I was an UG and I suspect this too has contributed to grade inflation.

Some students do work incredibly hard for their degrees. Some students are hugely serious, dedicated and professional about their degrees. But many students absolutely do/are not. And they're enabled not to work hard or take things seriously because universities increasingly hand-hold and walk students through their degree. And grade inflation is part of that.

The fee landscape feeds into this but its not as simple as "Students are paying loads = students are taking things very seriously". The marketisation of HE has much more impact of the wider environment and services available to students which, in turn, gives dedicated students more opportunities to be more dedicated but also gives less dedicated students a safety-net where they never actually have to take responsibility.

Also, the impact of fees is dependent on the individual student's background. For a working-class student, huge fees may well mean an impetus to work hard and get the most out. But, for other students, £9.5K per year is a drop in the ocean compared with how much their parents have been spending on school fees up until that point.

I did pay for my degree, BTW

Your comment is interesting @MrsSkylerWhite (and also @KStockHERO 's reply) because I do not get a sense that my students are big party animals - I mean, some of them will obviously be, but I don't think this is the main problem.
It is absolutely true that many student work part time jobs, sometimes with little certainty as to which shifts they will be working at any given point.
Other that that I see that students do seem to be putting on work, but there is little sense of organization, direction and maturity. I've found that students want to be told what should go in their essays or their dissertations - when in fact part of the process is to learn to discriminate what is relevant to build an argument and what isn't. There's also incredibly poor time management skills, which I think are partly because of the 24/7 culture these students have been brought up in and which was then made worse by the Covid pandemic. I've found that many students now think that if they allocate say 30 hours to researching and writing an essay, this means they first look at the brief three days before the assignment is due, work 10 hours per day for three days and then submit on time. Some of them seem genuinely puzzled when the slightest complication disrupts their planning (i.e. two of the three days are weekend days, and your course tutor doesn't reply to your e-mails during this period asking for clarification on the assignment brief; or the book you intended to borrow from the library is on loan to someone else), as if it had never occurred to them that to complete any task you should build in extra time to account for any issues.

Grade inflation is taken very seriously where I work. No way would anyone be saying blanket raising of marks. If anything it’s the opposite, we’ve had to shoehorn an extra (harder) assessment into every 2nd and 3rd year module to try and lower grades!

I did a humanities degree in the 90s, so I didn’t really get taught! 6-8 contact hours a week. I got one of 2 of the firsts given in my cohort and went on to do a PhD. I was told there was an exam board discussion around my mark.

I think culturally though, we were a bit stingy with top degrees. Lecturers from other cultures were surprised at the reluctance to use 30% of the marks (ie 70-100) and by the time massification of HE in the U.K. was complete by the 2000s, I think a-levels and then degree classification were inflated in a complementary way. And whilst before, the top marks were to produce the next generation of academics, we moved to a system whereby HE was mopping up half of all 18 years olds as part of a changing job market and the results were more of a signifier of a student having done well in HE and a safe choice for grad roles.

Its a bit simplistic but I think HE has a different functionality now than in the more elitist days.

Totally agree.

I did my first degree in 90's and my MSc in noughties. Probably similar standard of work for both. Got a 2:1 for 1st degree and 1st for postgrad.

I went to a very good Uni for my Bachelors, high entry tariff etc and only knew of 2 people in my year group who got firsts.

I think @Darhon has absolutely hit the nail on the head. Higher Education is just different now - more diverse and increasingly focussed towards more vocational degrees.

Complete agree about more learning support now. We were just meant to learn by osmosis.

No idea what STEM disciplines are like but I attribute a lot of grade inflation in my arts and humanities discipline to terrible assessment strategies (people who grade on feelings and ‘instinct’ instead of clear criteria or rubrics); poor staff standards (people who are not very competent themselves so they think an average student is great and a good student is a genius); laziness by staff (people who avoid failing students because students might get angry/upset and because resits interfere with summer break); younger and untrained staff (people who went through an easier system and are thrown in the deepend so they have no sense of standards); and whatever the hell is going with the younger generation psychologically and emotionally (so many of them are unable to cope with any kind of disruption while others have a huge sense of entitlement).

Completely agree with @KStockHERO though - some of the top students perform to an excellent standard by final year and could put some MA and PhD students to shame. Sadly, they are negatively impacted by the inflated grades given to their peers.

Also not just laziness of staff not wanting to give a student a lower mark and deal with the consequences but also lack of time due to massively unreasonable workloads. Have I got time to fail 3x students or am I better off giving them 45% and not having to deal with tutorials and remarking. Which then means border line passes become 50%, etc, etc. Everything gets shoved up slightly.

I come from a university system where it was not unusual at all for 40-50% of students to fail a course and have to re-sit during the summer. And this was in Humanities - some STEM could be something like 80%. I do not think this is good at all, but neither is the other extreme where giving a fail to a piece of work is seen as this terrible tragedy that must be avoided at all costs. In my department, even if we have something that should clearly fail (like an essay that responds to the wrong essay brief, or an essay consisting of a paragraph on the matter vaguely paraphrased from wikipedia, a corrupted file that we chased up repeatedly without ever getting a reply from the student, etc.), we consult with a colleague before awarding the fail, we often consult with the Head of Department, we discuss again at the exam boards and sometimes we even ask the external examiner to look at it.
And I completely get what you say @RubyRoss about poor staff standards. Something that has long struck me about the UK (I arrived in the mid-00s, and I understand things might have been different before that) is how specialized the degrees get from quite early on; in a historical subject like mine, it is entirely possible to graduate without having ever studied certain historical periods or very important figures. Meaning that when you have to mark work on said historical periods, you have zero knowledge of the state of the field, bibliography or even the most basic facts. I am seeing this a lot with PhD students and recent PhDs employed as GTAs or guest lecturers.

I can see both sides of this. Yes, sure, it's not wonderful that overworked/underprepared GTAs and postdocs might teach badly; yes, it could be there's grade inflation rather than genuine improvement.

But, I really do think things are changing for the better. When I did my undergraduate degree, not quite 20 years ago, one of my teachers insisted he'd come to our bedrooms and sit on our beds (there were only two of us, doing a niche language option). He talked openly about how women were inferior to men and black people were more stupid. Those subjects took up far more of his interest than actually teaching us. We had lecturers who simply rambled about their latest enthusiasm, without any attempt to make a link to the actual courses or modules. Several of my lecturers and supervisors openly joked about disabled students' allowances or about dyslexia; mental health issues were treated as a regrettable individual weakness.

I'm sure that sort of thing wasn't universal, but it also wasn't that uncommon.

After I finished my PhD I was hired by my undergraduate institution and spent several years, and it disturbed me to see how little those older faculty members had changed. But, they'd mostly stopped being so active as teachers (as they'd got professorships and grants and retired). They were actively baffled that their younger colleagues (me included) had spent time learning how best to teach neurodiverse students, or had undergone training for working with students who had mental health difficulties. We'd have exam board meetings, and they would be insisting that a brilliant student who wrote a first-class dissertation could not be awarded a first class mark if she or he regularly spelt words wrongly. And we would be pointing out that said student had a diagnosis of dyslexia, and it wasn't fair or right to quibble about spellings.

When people talk about grade inflation, it's those anecdotes that come to mind, and TBH, I am kind of ok with grade inflation if it might mean that more women aren't taught by sleazy perverts sitting on their beds and rambling about racism, or more dyslexic students are rewarded for their arguments and ideas rather than their ability to distinguish 'principal' from 'principle'.

@xxuserxx , Your question about the extent to which our greater numbers of 1sts and 2.1s reflect genuinely higher entrance standards was interesting. Thank you for the link to the discussion of grade inflation at A Levels.

I think that genuine improvement in our student body supports an increase from 50% to 60-63% of degrees at this level. Nothing like close to 75%. I agree with @KStockHERO that the top students are now more proactive and benefit from it. I also find that a number of weaker UGs approach projects quite proactively, but this can mean that I have to teach them quite basic things. I don’t mind, as we are in STEM and they haven’t necessarily had the chance to do any writing before their UG project, but the level of ignorance as compared to those who have done eg an IB qualification is striking.

Although I also have the sense that for the most part our students are not party animals and feel that they are working hard, about half of my project students have been characterised by the descriptions PPs have used above: unable to plan or to do any work whilst waiting for a (weekend) email, etc. No concept of writing a rough draft!

That sounds fairly horrendous and I’m guessing Oxbridge? I’m not convinced that that sort of thing doesn’t still happen there and it’s quite different to what I am discussing here. I also did my degree nearly 20 years ago and what you describe would not have happened at my large red brick RG institution. Definitely no lecturers sitting on our beds and any talk about black people being inferior would have generated a huge complaint.
I am talking about a gradual inflation in the number of top grades which has coincided precisely with the marketisation of HE and the competition to gain as many students as possible. On many courses, even if entry requirements are high on paper, this doesn’t mean all students on that course meet these. There are hundreds of courses where students are accepted, sometimes with significantly lower grades than the official entry, because they bring in money to the university.
I agree that there is more explicit direction now, how to write an essay etc but I still don’t think it accounts for the dramatic rise in grades. I have also encountered plenty of students who have very very poor writing and research skills yet still expect high grades. Preparation for seminars is also pretty dire and a huge contrast to what I used to do as a student. There is also a belief by many students that they are working extremely hard, when that is evidently not the case. On one module I teach, I had more people with extensions than without this year. I refuse to believe these were all genuine. Throughout my entire time at university, I never once applied for an extension.
I appreciate that it’s probably different depending on where you work. I’m at a mid ranking pre-92, not RG.

The comment about Oxbridge is interesting here because I feel that increasingly students are expecting, and universities are promoting, an Oxbridge-type experience (i.e. quite personalized, with a low staff to student ratio), but of course without bothering to achieve the grades that would guarantee admission to Oxbridge or even putting in the hard work required while you're there. The attitude towards essay hand-ins increasingly seems to be one of "as and when", with extensions being routinely abused; when it comes to the more stringent special circumstances processes, again many students seem to think that the rules do not apply to them and that I can just make an exception for them (the truth is, I sometimes do, because I am increasingly pressured by colleagues to be sympathetic and not being "ableist" and the like. It is difficult). Some students expect detailed comments on subsequent essay drafts - apparently it is not enough to say "read more academic articles and books and absorb the style", you have to comment specifically on what is wrong.
Guess what, if I had a small group of 10 tutees I could make it work even if 3 or 4 of each batch of assignment were late. But as it is I have more than 100 students distributed among several courses. If you open up university education to most of the population, which I absolutely think we need to do, while keeping costs reasonable you have to accept a certain degree of "massification".