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.

Yes there is. And I’m an academic.

Introducing fees totally changed the landscape. You’re paying the university to get a degree. You expect to be given a good one. You’re a consumer and a customer. Unis are a service.

Plus the assessment methods are very variable now. The course I work on has no exams. Students produce posters, have a formal discussions, write a ‘report’, produce a PowerPoint for assessments. These all test knowledge but I’m unsure about rigour.

Does all this matter? More kids go to uni than ever before but it doesn’t increase job opportunities really. Just made uni more accessible to more young people.

Hmm. I'm not sure it is the teaching. DD says the teaching at this university is much better than it was for her undergraduate degree. She achieved an average of over 80% in the exams because she worked extremely hard for them.

As it is a much smaller cohort she has managed to build up a rapport with the teaching staff and can approach them at the end of seminars/lectures to discuss anything she doesn't understand or has missed. She says most of the students don't do this and leave as soon as they have finished.

Over the Christmas break she is working on a 3,000 word assignment and revising for 4 exams. This isn't a course for the lazy and unmotivated.

My ds is at Russell group but shares with poly turned uni students and there is no comparison in the workload. They don’t go to lectures, no work done and will probs end up with decent degrees Ds has to work his socks off

Same, work at a Russell Group Uni and a mid table, both have much more flexibility and less rigour than when I attended a RG university in the 1990s. We had exams and assignments, exams in a lecture theatre, you knew it or you didn’t, assignments 2 2,000 word essays produced on a typewriter, using notes from short term loan university library books and your brain, no internet, no AI. Lecturers owed you no favours, about 5% got a first, 33% a 2:1 and the rest 2:2 or 3rd. I worked my socks off for a 2:1.

Maybe STEM/healthcare related subjects have more exams? DD has always had exams.

🙄 sure... Maybe your niece is a bit smarter than you think. Russell Group universities are doing it just as much, if not more, than others.

www.bbc.com/news/education-40654933

Totally agree with this. Grade inflation is now embedded on the education system from GCSE right through to degree level.
I see it in my own children
DS is far more academically able than his sister but they look the same on paper. The only difference is they are 3 years apart.
Even in that short time both can see grade inflation.
Both acknowledge there is no way they should have the same grades on paper especially in STEM subjects.
Sadly the bump to earth comes when employers, no longer believing exam results from unis give their own aptitude tests to sort out the true top 10% to employ for high level graduate jobs.Massive disappointment for a large number of unemployed graduates, resulting in some of the best educated barista in the world.

@Namechange234567honestly no comparison / non Russell group have an extremely easy ride

Firsts were uncommon when I was at university - the people who got them were either super smart,worked their socks off and had little social life or there were a small group who were extremely friendly with the lecturers (not a sackable offence in those days).
Also no one knew their grades or marks until the final results were published at the end of the final year.

In 1982/3 I got 3 EE offers. One from Oxford after sitting the entrance exam and interview. It was the standard Oxford offer - you passed the eaxm and they asked for EE regardless of what you were predicted. The other offers were from UCL and Nottingham and both came with pretty stern notes from admissions to say they wouldn't be happy if that was what I got but that they didn't want to put any obstacles in may way in case something went wrong. I was very unusual - most of the girls in my class with UCL or Notts offers were AAB or ABB.

In 1988 there were realtively few firsts at Oxford but a higher percentage there than other RGs - you might get one or two at an RG in a popular subject and 5-10% at Oxford

This was the same for me in terms of timeframe and experience. I worked hard and just scraped a first. I think the introduction of more continuous assessments and fewer exams is not a good thing, particularly in this day of AI, etc.

I'm interested to know how parents find out so much about the courses their children study - how rigorous the marking is, how hard their child works compared to other students on their course (subjective at best), and how that compares to students on different courses at different universities (impossible to know).

I was an academic for 25 years, in both a new university and an RG one, but I didn't know those things about my children, both of whom went to different universities. I knew what they told me, but my experience of lecturing and external examining never persuaded me that they had the first idea of any of that sort of thing. All most of us know is based on experience of the institutions we have attended or worked in, and even then we can only really speak about one subject in a particular year or three.

What I will say is that A level grades are not necessarily predictors of high achievement at UG level. They measure different skills, learnt in very different environments.

King Charles didn’t go to uni in the 90’s

The regulation changes have made a difference. 20 years ago it was 1/3 of Level 5 and 2/3 of Level 6, averaged. Now for us it's a choice between that, or just Level 6, with just the Best 100 credits counted too. It's made a difference. The "borderline" area is bigger too. I've seen students get a First on 67.45%

DS is doing a degree apprenticeship but the degree part of it is a complete joke. He's in his second year and hasn't written an essay longer than a thousand words yet! At A-level his EPQ was 6000 words and his NEA was 100 pages + long (including code). He's really struggling with saying anything worthwhile in 500 or 1000 words and he isn't allowed to go over.

He'll probably get a first - or a 2.1 if his disinterest in the course means he doesn't put the effort in that he should. If he gets a first it will be so far away from a first from Oxford, Cambridge or Imperial as to be a joke. Fortunately the work part of the apprenticeship is brilliant and he loves it, and that experience is likely to be much more important to him than anything he could be taught at any uni.

DS got 70% overall in his maths A-level and got a B. Can't believe you can get a first with 67.45%.

Everyone I speak to these days seems to have got a first. And they don't seem like particularly bright or outstanding students. A first was a huge deal in the early 90s. I think a first now is like a 2:1 back then; a 2:2 back then is a 2:1 now.

To be fair, they have many times more students than they did years ago. When I was at uni in the late 80s/early 90s there were 8,000 at my uni, now there are 24,000. Universities like Leeds and UCL have numbers in the region of 40,000-50,000 these days, up from the low teens 30 years ago so I’m not sure grade inflation is a major reason for more firsts - there are simply more people there, including very talented students from overseas. As mentioned above, there’s more scaffolding, easier access to information, support, and resources, and better quality teaching alongside greater student conscientiousness, career anxiety, and the desire for ‘value for money’ means that there are more opportunities and drivers to achieve higher grades than there used to be.

I'm an academic and have worked in RG and plate glass unis. IME there was quite a bit of grade inflation in the financially struggling glass plate because they needed good NSS scores and there was a lot of pressure to bend over backwards and do anything students wanted. At the RG unis there is more boundary and expectation setting. Grade inflation is monitored closely and it will be heavily scrutinized in boards of studies. If your module has inflated then you need to explain why to the board and the external examiners and bring it back in line the next year.

A colleague of mine wrote a course book for students in the first
and second year Sixth Form. Some years later and a well respected University is using this A level course book for their first and second years.

My child got an A at GCSE in a foreign language. (I flatter them when I say they probably knew half of what I knew at O level.)

A 2:2 in the mid 80s was regarded as normal and perfectly respectable.

2/3 of students on my course got a 2:2 or 3rd, 1/3 got 2:1 or 1st, and less than 10 out of 200 got a 1st

You didn't have to pass Oxford entrance to get an EE offer either, they made that offer if they really wanted you, a fellow pupil at my school had that offer (good job too as she got an E in the subject she was accepted for!)

Disagree. In a job I had in 1995, my manager said that anyone with a 2.2 or lower wouldn't be put forward for higher level work. Yes, they'd get the job. But no movement beyond the lower echelons. Promotion prospects poor.

May be true for your ex-manager but total bollocks across the board. I ended up as a CEng, a head of department and then a consultant with a 2:2 Many of my fellow 2:2 students did well in r&d and progressed according to their abilities, not on how they did on an exam one afternoon in 1983!

As regards uni offers, I was offered CCC from everyone, including Imperial & UCL. for my course CCC was a pretty standard offer

Academic here - yes it's definitely a thing for complex reasons. Students more like customers for a start.

I know a retired university professor. He confirmed that grade inflation is a real thing. I was awarded my degree in 1986 and had a 2:2, along with the vast majority of other students. 2:1s were much less common. Today’s 2:1s are the equivalent of our 2:2s. He also told me that plagiarism was far more common now with the technology that is available. AI is only going to make things worse. I think we can go further. Today’s A levels are a similar standard to the O levels of yesteryear and GCSEs are like the old CSEs. The number of A and A grades awarded appears to go up year on year. When I did A levels in 1983, As did not exist and it was fairly unusual to get A grades. A B grade was considered very good and Cs and Ds were perfectly respectable grades. As a musician, I can categorically say that graded piano exams are easier than they were prior to the year 2000 as well to the point where today’s grade 8 is the equivalent of a 1980s grade 7. These days, the sense of entitlement among some candidates is eye watering as they are disappointed if they get a basic pass rather than a merit or, preferably, a distinction. The prizes for all culture, which has been so prevalent over the past few decades, is largely to blame in my opinion.