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.

@Svalberg DH got a 2:2. Became a consulting engineer. He’s CEng, FICE, FIStructE and FCIHT. Not bad at all. 50 years ago no one thought a 2:2 was useless. Most companies wanted you for what you could do, not a degree classification. DH was a Chartered Engineer at 24 which was about the quickest possible. His employers at the time could see beyond the degree.

DH was a Cambridge Maths undergraduate in the early - mid 1970s. After his PhD he became an an academic and he has just retired from a maths professorship at an institution just below COWI (Cambridge Oxford Imperial Warwick) in status

For his Cambridge admission he had S levels,a precursor to STEP, in Maths and Physics. The Maths S level paper he sat for Cambridge admission was intended to stretch students. Nevertheless it contained material not taught until Y3 in his relatively esteemed School of Mathematics. As brutal as STEP is thought to be, the S levels beat it by some distance.

The grade inflation permeates every assessment

I was a mature student in the early 1980s and determined to get a 1st at a good RG university. I knew that I needed the grade to stand any chance of a studentship to contnue to postgrad level. Most of the students on my course got 2/1 and 2/2. As an academic I saw a decline in quality of graduate students and grade inflation since 2000. I now do private tutoring at postgrad level. Some of my students need a lot of help with the specific demands of academic writing, such as critical thinking, proper citation, avoiding plagiarism, grammar, and vocabulary at the postgraduate level. Some of them are not working at the level which I had reached by my second undergraduate year.

Going to university nowadays is a waste of time and money unless you want to be a doctor or something. Anyone else is better off starting work at 18.

A previous lecturer of mine (she was awful) got awarded her doctorate in being queer in the classroom.

They've changed the grades though, grade one as was is more like the preliminary grade now. I also don't think grade inflation in music is that much of a problem if it encourages people to stick with it.

30 years in my case.

If the government measures university performance in part on the percentage of high degrees awarded, it can surely not be a surprise if the number of firsts and II.1s increases.

Some students do indeed work harder than their counterparts a generation ago, but that does not explain the increase. When I graduated in 1989 one person in my cohort of almost 70 got a first. Fifteen years later the cohort had increased to almost 200 and the number of firsts was around 30.

Six times as many proportionally wise. 30% instead of 5% so the number of students is irrelevant, except they are less picky now in who they take and a lot of students these days do paid work for a considerable number of hours each week that takes them away from study.

but some of the comments on this thread are pretty insulting to the students who have worked hard.

This ‘don’t insult the hard working students’ emotional blackmail is reeled out year after year as grade inflation devalues their qualifications. It is also pretty insulting to hard working students in the past to pretend grade inflation didn’t happen and they were just lazy and thick.

I am puzzled over this obsession with 70% as a grade boundary for a first, or the fact that some universities place the actual boundary at 67% or whatever. Having the same percentage as a boundary is rather meaningless if the assignments set vary in difficulty.

I am sure in the past (pre 1992) there was some standardisation of degrees between universities that at some point changed (possibly in 1992)?

The problem is many employers now look for degrees for jobs that don’t really need them, and they never ask for them before, as a quick way to narrow down candidates.

What a silly comment. It isn't emotional blackmail. Are you saying that all students these days are lazy? You sound quite bitter. Why not just do away with universities then except for those professions where a degree is essential?

No-one is pretending or denying that grade inflation is happening and I agree that degrees have been devalued and diluted.

Does this mean that professionals such as doctors, dentist, lawyers, vets, engineers, chartered surveyers etc are less well educated than 30 years ago or have their standards slipped as well?

What nonsense. Students these days are not more of less lazy, they just get higher grades for the same level of knowledge and skill. Of course people are trying to deny grade inflation by saying it is insulting to suggest students are getting higher grades because of it rather than because they are brighter and harder working than any students who have gone before and all their lecturers are better at teaching too! This argument is thrown out there so the real issue does not need to be addressed.

However, in one respect students these days are harder working and that is in having to hold part time jobs to sustain themselves. But this is time and energy away from their studies. Time they are not studying and physical and mental energy not dedicated to their course. For many students this is a good number of shifts every week and can really impact their ability to revise or find time for assignments etc.

I don't think university students work any harder or are any more intelligent than students 30/40 years ago were. The problem is, they look better on paper and a lot of young people apply to university who previously would have known they were not academic enough.
The number of Firsts and 2:1 degrees are now a much higher percentage of the student body as a whole and this shouldn't be happening.
A 2:2 used to be an average sort of grade in the 80's which would allow you to access the majority of graduate jobs. Employers understood this and advertised accordingly.
The current situation reduces the value of British degrees to a worldwide audience. Employers are more cagey of the qualifications on C V's and consequently adopt their own technical testing to weed out overinflated grades.
Unfortunately there are swathes of disillusioned graduates who can't find employment because universities are more concerned with " bums on seats," putting on courses that don't lead to employment and grade inflation to make their courses look good.
The less academic graduates are being sold a lie, perpetuated by successive governments to hide the severity of youth unemployment and the sobering fact that there are very few mid range jobs out there any more.
I don't have a solution to this but I think the whole system should be more honest with these young people.

I’m a lecturer. We are not allowed to inflate grades and to be frank, I wouldn’t do this anyway! All work is second marked and then a sample will be checked by someone external at the end of the academic year so we can’t give our favourite students better grades or whatever.

It’s possibly easier to get a first or 2:1 now because most uni’s criteria means if you totally fuck up in second year, you can fully rectify it in final year. Most will use either average of final year or second and final combined, depending on which works out higher but you will always get the highest possible classification from either average.

That said, I haven’t noticed more firsts. Most still get a 2:1. There are some who scrape a first and I always find this deeply unfair. This means their average worked out to be 70-71% but actually, most of their work was 2:1 standard. When I did my undergrad my average was 80% and in the humanities, this is unheard of and I won awards. I still don’t come across students like me, I had peer reviewed published work in second and final year. You don’t come across that level often, once in a blue moon. Most students are average 2:1 standard, some are awful and fail or get a third.

Is getting a third that common? I don’t know if failing means people are “awful” could have other things going on.

In the past your grade hung on your dissertation and final exams, or in the case of my cousin at Cambridge, just four exams across two consecutive days. You just had to pass the exams at the end of first and second year to be allowed into the next year.

There are objectively a lot more firsts these days; in the early 1990s it was 5-7%, now it is around 30%. So whilst you may not ‘inflate’ marks, you are either setting easier tasks or awarding marks where they were not previously awarded.

To be fair you may have gotten an EE offer but generally they were still A students getting these offers (preA* days).

I’ve checked my RG course. In 2000, from 200+ students, there were 3 firsts. By 2019 they had more like 250 students, of whom 66 got a first. A year later (during Covid) it was up to 100 firsts.

@Sartre

That said, I haven’t noticed more firsts

Really?

Did you not notice the massive grade inflation between 2010 and 2020?

Graduate attainment rates continue to increase. Between 2010-11 and 2020-21, the proportion of UK-domiciled, full-time first degree graduates attaining a first class honours degree from an English higher education provider has more than doubled, from 15.7 per cent in 2010-11 to 37.9 per cent in 2020-21. Expanding this population shows that in 2020-21 84.4 per cent of students achieved a first or upper second class degree, up from 67.0 per cent in 2010-11.

And:

By 2020-21, all providers in this analysis had experienced significant increases in their unexplained awarding of firsts alone, and most had experienced significant increases in their unexplained awarding of first and upper second classes combined, when compared with their awarding in 2010-11.

www.officeforstudents.org.uk/media/7054/ofs-202222.pdf

What does 'working hard' mean? And why does it matter? If I'm ill, I don't want a hard-working doctor - I want one who knows what s/he's doing. Similarly, I don't care how hard someone has worked to write a novel - if it's awful I don't want to read it. Degrees measure achievement, not work ethic, fortunately - or they did when students and parents with sharp elbows couldn't push to have assignment methods altered to suit their personal abilities.

So many parents who go on (and on) about how hard their children have worked, when all they can know is that they were told that by the children. Similarly, when we hear about how 'talented' a student is - talented as opposed to what?

I do think that grades have inflated, but I also think that the older we get, the more we know, so looking at what a 21 year old can do is very different when we are 21 ourselves from how it appears when we are 50 with many years' experience of working in the same field. I also agree with the comments about fees driving the desire for Firsts.

As AI continues to advance and could surpass university graduates in the coming decades, it’s important to remember it’s still learning, evolving, and capable of making mistakes. A university degree might not hold the same weight in the future. Debates over degrees and classifications may fade as AI potentially overtakes graduates, rendering such arguments pointless. The real challenge will be between AI and those who excel in areas beyond its abilities.

Academic for 30 years. Academic standards have definitely fallen and grade inflation is real. Students are given multiple opportunities to resubmit failed work. There is pressure on staff to give every possible opportunity/make every possible accommodation to enable students to progress and pass. Students are spoon fed now in a way that simply didn’t happen in the past. Many students complain about having to read a whole journal article (and of course they can and do run it through ChatGPT to provide them with a summary, so they don’t have to.) The idea that they might be asked to read a whole book (something completely standard when I was student myself some 45 years ago) is largely considered absurd.

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

@Violinist64 that’s interesting. Have the music theory exams also become easier?

Ditto. I never had any meetings over my dissertation or thesis in 2016/17.