To think there is grade inflation in universities

[Thetelly8]

I’ve noticed a lot of students gain very high grades it seems people getting a 2.2 or a third is extremely unusual.

Congratulations. That’s your university. Doesn’t mean you can be on here sneering at others.

I’m sorry you didn’t get the experience you thought you deserved.

Or thought you had paid for, if you were paying fees. That’s a whole different mindset.

If you passed the entrance exam and interview you received an unconditional offer and only needed two E grades. I sat the entrance exam in 1985 (rejected after interview) and those students from my sixth form college who received an offer did only need two Es.

Agree. Dh and I were at university in the 1980s and it was generally two or three students per course who were awarded firsts.

It quite literally is what I paid for and didn’t get.

Still will!

Not a nice post .

Grades have inflated a bit in my experience as an academic of over 20 years (when I started teaching a first at UG was very hard to get, now it's much more like getting an A at school - hard but several in each group will manage it, rather than maybe one person in a year group).

But!

And it's a huge but...

Academics now are also often much better teachers than eg when I was a student in the 90s.

We have to do teacher training and keep our professional teaching affiliations in good standing (I have two postgraduate teaching qualifications and am expected to be able to publish and present research on pedagogy as well as my own academic subject). The amount of support and structure we give to students now is vastly different to in the past. When I first started students would fail because their work was frankly awful, now we give a lot more extensions and a lot more in-built study skills etc. Very few students submit actually awful work now (and when they do, they still fail).

So, in my experience (at a top 10 uni) there's a bit of grade inflation at the top in that it's a bit easier to get a first for a piece of work now, but the quality of work is also better in general in the mid-range (if less individual and creative), and there are fewer fails because fewer students produce work which isn't up to the basic standard because we do a lot more scaffolding work including pastoral.

(which is not to say that there aren't some academics who aren't good teachers and/or don't enjoy teaching and it shows. Nor to say that there aren't also a lot of us who are overworked and unable to give our students the attention we want to.)

Yep true. I went to uni in the 90's and it wasn't highly regarded then either and firsts were very rare. However it could be that students are working harder because of fees. When I was at uni it was free and you got grants so perhaps there wasn't the same pressure.

69.5 is quite a distance from 70. We regularly have students complaining that they weren't given the 0.5% to get to a H1.1 but if they are undergrad, that is the equivalent of 6% in one module or in postgrad 9%.

But yeah, grades have dramatically inflated. I recently came across a graduation booklet from the 80's (back then students were listed by grade) and the percentage of firsts then and now are completely different. Way more now. Nowadays nobody just gets a pass.

The main difference now is that there is more teaching done (in hours), and WAY more support given to students. Every single module at my institution has to have formative assessments with feedback given midway through the course (guidance and feedback but no grade) before anything summative (graded) is submitted. There are mandatory 'engagement with feedback' training sessions, mid-module reviews, mandatory personal review tutorials for all students, assessment and feedback personal tutorials, additional courses put on by the institution (in academic skills, outside departmental teaching), drop-in sessions for all modules, mandated individual academic staff drop-in sessions. Every exam we set has to have past papers available and anonymised banks of assessed work, with grades shown, for current students to view. We have to set test questions and answers to be made available before the exam, there are module quizzes throughout to monitor progress. It goes on and on. None of this existed when I was an undergraduate - you went to as many lectures as you could stomach and then did your best in the end of year (or program) finals.

It does irritate me to hear these constant moans about grade inflation as if course are getting easier and we give firsts away like toffees. It's still damn hard to get a first and the students getting one need to be very intelligent, hyper switched on, and work incredibly hard. In fact, it's demeaning to current students to infer that doing well is easier these days - it isn't, it's just harder to do badly.

Tbf it’s pretty unusual that 69.5 isn’t bumped to 70 - do you not even look at preponderance?

I got one of two first awarded out of a cohort of 120 in the 90s. It was a big deal: we had advance notification and were met and congratulated by the Dean and the uni photographer when we arrived to receive our results.
But literally nobody has ever asked what degree I was awarded since, so I wonder whether it really makes much of a difference?
I have since mentored undergraduates in my professional role, and I notice that even the weakest candidates are scaffolded by their university based mentors to the point that it could be argued that they are not necessarily doing the work themselves -the universities have become desperate not to fail anyone. I wonder whether this has come about since the introduction of tuition fees? In my day, when we studied for free, it seemed institutions did not feel so obliged to buttress student attainment in this way.

I went to uni when there were full grants, so I had no expectation of ‘getting what I paid for’.

We were told by lecturers we were fecking nuisances because they had to waste their time teaching us instead doing their research work.

On my undergrad degree, you wouldn’t get a first unless you had produced something innovative, and that was the same for many degrees. I still have my graduation programme and there are very few firsts awarded across a wide range of degree programmes - most are 2:1s and 2:2s with a few thirds and the odd pass degree.

I don’t think the poster sounds bitter at all. To me, they sound white matter-of-fact and honest. Also, what do they have to be bitter about?

And my 2.1 from 1988 would piss all over your sons. Go figure.

DD's university didn't round up marks. 69.5% was very definitely a 2.1.

When I was at uni you did your dissertation without help.
Which is as it should be when you are about to graduate. It isn't school.

I think a lot less people will be going as the feeds increase.

Perhaps bitchy would be a better word than bitter, with regards to the niece. They sound bitter that their son didn’t receive a higher grade, but is instead on the same level as the lowly niece.

You're right. In the 90s Cambridge would have been AAA ( no A star then) and a couple of step grades.

Oxford did do two E offers, but only for those who had passed their ( toughest than Alevel) entrance exam. It was considered an unconditional offer, but you had to get EE for the funding to go through, so weren't allowed to offer less.
The typical entry would still have been AAA.

OxFord & Cambridge did entrance exams then

DP works in HE. They bump up at 67.5%

As a practice assessor myself i have to mark, along side academic assessors, assignments with OU. Their marking rubric allows 89%, 77%, 65% depending on where you think a student sits in the descriptors - never had it done like that - so the student can’t get a mark that needs rounding up

Hard agree with this. In addition, access to information is so much easier. Search engines, online library databases, Google Scholar, etc. means there’s no trekking to the library and searching citation indices on your hands and knees for papers, and then filling in forms to have them sent from the British Library. Added to that, most academics now go through ‘teacher training’ early in their careers, and they are more accountable for a class of low grades, so the quality of teaching has improved, and the VLE is full of all the presentations, readings, assessments, assessment matrices, and other resources, so everything is at your fingertips.

So, I don’t know that there has been grade inflation as such - the quality of the student work is as good today as it has ever been. What is different is that there is much more scaffolding, and students mostly take their work more seriously (prob because of fees). My own DD refuses to skip a class because, as she says, ‘I’m paying for it so I’m going to get the most out of it’.

It annoys me when employees say they only look at your grade and not the uni you got it from as if this was somehow progressive. A first from Oxbridge and a first from your typical former poly are in no way equivalent!

I wonder how many highly intelligent working class people have missed out on opportunities because they "only" got a 2:1 from Oxbridge while thick and lazy middle class kids from other unis stroll into jobs with a first.