Degree Grade Inflation?

[catslife]

It is well documented that A level grades have increased significantly since the late 1980s/early 1990s but has this also affected degrees?
What class of degree does the average RG uni student obtain these days - in my day I'm sure that obtaining a 2:2 was average but is it now higher?

There has absolutely been grade inflation in higher education. We have actual targets for the minimum number of students getting firsts and 2:1s and questions are asked if any module falls below this.

Across the sector I n the last decade, the number of students getting first has doubled (to around about 1/5 of students). Most students get a 2:1 (around about 1/2 of students). Only about 1/4 of students get a 2:2. That leaves. That leaves very few getting thirds or below.

The VCs, of course, will tell you that this is all because teaching has improved and students are working harder, but I don't think their staff necessarily agree.

For comparison, if you go back 15-20 years, c.10% achieved a first. In 2003-4 it was 11%, and around 9% in the early 90s. Just under 10% of my class achieved firsts (in 2003), which was fairly representative of the general pattern of the time.

Last year, more that 70% of students were awarded firsts or 2:1s.

In the early 1980s c.60% of students achieved 2:2s (and far fewer people went to university) compared to around 25% now. At that point, only c. 5% (or less) were awarded firsts (nearly 20% now). Given the much smaller numbers of people attending university back then, it was much more unusual to meet someone with a first.

The higher education statistics agency (HESA) is where to look for statistics.

I graduated from a RG uni in 1992 with a 2:2. I remember feeling gutted that I hadn't worked harder, but not a single person on my course achieved a first. Not one.

There has been grade inflation but it is tied to the fact that to get a grad job of any sort, a student must have a 2.1 or 1st. Since all applications are now done online, anyone applying with a 2.2 or 3rd will be immediately rejected without anyone actually looking at the application. This applies to Oxbridge and RG unis as well.

Don't forget that one league table measure is number of 1sts and 2:1s awarded....

I was surprised at how few 1sts there were at my DDs graduation ceremony last summer. Nowhere near 10%!!!. Not all top flight RG unis are sprinkling 1sts around! However, I have a suspicion it's easier to get a 1st at the less discerning universities. Employers know this and a 1st in Sociology from, say Portsmouth, won't be the best degree in the world to get you a job. A 2:1 in Economics from Durham will probably be worth more to employers. Employers are also aware that some courses have low entry qualifications so getting a 1st from one of those courses is probably less demanding than a 1st from a university course demanding A*AA. 2:2s are now a real problem for job applications unless you have a lot of relevant work experience. There is a choice to be made for the A level student: do you go to a lesser university and get a better classification of degree or go to the best university and get a 2:2? Do you plump for an easy to get onto subject at the RG university or go for a better subject at an ex Poly?

Out of interest, do Oxbridge award more 1sts than they used to? Also years ago, far fewer people went to university, so a 2:2 was fine. The pool of graduates was small. My DH with a 2:2 was offered 5 Graduate engineer jobs. Would be lucky to get an interview now! My sister got AAA at A level in 1982 but she "only" got a 2:1. She is no brighter than my DD who also got a 2:1. The standards have remained high at some universities.

Oxbridge have significantly increased their numbers of firsts in the last twenty years, yes. (The numbers are up by about 15-20% in my field.) Throughout most of STEM around 25-35% getting firsts is the new "normal", both at top universities and weaker universities. STEM seems to award more firsts than other areas.

When I was a PhD student it wasn't unusual for 2:i students to get PhD positions but nowadays it is pretty rare for students to get PhD positions without having a first.

At my DD's graduation 2 years ago out of her course of 90 there were 6 firsts but on the psychology course there were approx 20 firsts. This was at a Russell Group university. I was surprised at the time as I would have assumed the results would be similar they had similar students. So maybe it depends on the course and not just the Institution.
My course (graduated in 1986) had no firsts..

I think there has been "grade inflation", but it is something I completely support at my institution at least.

We have basically been marking out of maximum of 70-75 for decades. A student almost had to turn in an original piece of research to gain 80%+. I just don't think it is a realistic expectation of undergraduate work. About two years ago the grade descriptors changed for 70-79%; 80-89%; 90-100%. This had led to a higher number of first-class marks, but our increase has been statistically insignificant. Moreover, there is greater spread of first-class marks which is important too.

We have checks and balances. Our system immediately prints module marks attained in previous years and standard deviation figures. And I think that the external examining system functions as a check on disparity between institutions. It is certainly something I look at quite closely as an external examiner at an RG uni and elsewhere.

By the way (as an employee of one) we should be careful with the use of RG as shorthand for excellence to the detriment of non-RG unis. Partly because I have lots of great colleagues at excellent non-RG unis, but also because it is, in essence, a self-selecting lobby group.

An additional thought. Nobody should underestimate the improvement in learning and teaching in the HE sector over the last decade, and the impact this has had on attainment levels.

Thanks for the comments that confirm my suspicions. Yes degree subject may well be a factor as well as the uni attended. However I started this thread after a conversation with a friend whose ds has studied the same BSc course as me at the same uni. So the only difference would be between graduating in 2014 and in the late 1980s.
When I graduated it would have been approx 10% 1sts another 10% 3rds or less, approx 50% 2(ii)s and the rest 2(i)s and you could obtain good graduate job with 2(ii) or above.
The comments about postgrad degrees are interesting as well. So if a 1st is usually now needed for a PhD would a 2(i) be needed for an MSc (used to be OK with a 2(ii))?

My impression is that nowadays most Master's programmes would require a 2.1. You'd need very strong mitigating circumstances and/or a lot of relevant work experience to be accepted with a 2.2.

I don't know if most Ph.D. programmes require a Master's but I know a good many do. Some of the funded Ph.D. programmes pay for the applicant to do a Master's first and then go on to do a 3-year Ph.D. programme (1+3 funding). I'd be surprised if you didn't have to have a 1st to get onto those.

You need a first (and a masters, preferably with distinction) to get a PhD studentship where I am now.

For masters degrees it depends who's paying: self-funded students are often allowed in with a 2:i or equivalent. The income from taught masters programmes is often very important in a department's finances.

You say the only difference would be graduating in 2014 and the late 1980s. That is a long time difference is my experience - there have been particularly radical changes in approaches to learning and teaching (for example many new lecturing appointments have to hold a PGCHE or complete the qualification within a certain time of appointment).

Postgraduate entry. Yes - the money counts. But we also need really good students that will complete within the set time period. This is especially true if funding is coming from the big granting bodies. Poor completion rates impact on institutional standing and could also, potentially, see the home department unable to apply for external funds for MA/MSc or PhD places for a set period of time.

We would take a self-funding MA or MSc student with a good 2:I, but would only consider a 2:II under very particular circumstances (one eye on completion rates again). A student would be highly unlikely to get funding without a first, and even then the competition is fierce (which is when it becomes important to be able to differentiate between a 75% and and 85% candidate for example).

We are moving into an "Integrated Masters" provision though, where students automatically move into an extra year on the current undergraduate (well, as long as they pass their degree) and are awarded and MA/MSc.

My DD was offered a place on an integrated Masters undergraduate degree in MFL. If she did the Erasmus year abroad, it would take 5 years. We asked if there was any advantage in doing this when it came to employability. The lecturer said they hadn't noticed any difference between the Masters graduates and the Bachelor graduates. So for an extra year, there was little advantage. They pointed out, that this was not a Masters degree at the end of 5 years. Masters undergraduates are common in Engineering because it fast tracks qualification to Chartered Engineer status. However, we could not see the advantage in MFL.

Also where student numbers are falling, in MFL, if you show a talent in a particular aspect of study, students are encouraged to take a Masters. My DD got a 2:1 but had 1sts in some aspects of her study. One was also an area which would have benefitted from further study, according to her lecturer. DD had already decided what she was going to do post university, but I wonder if the difficulty of getting onto a Masters course does depend on subject and interest area and maybe being supported by an existing member of staff.

Having been on PGCHE courses, I'm not at all convinced that they are anything more that a box checking excercise. 'Look. Our staff are all qualified in teaching now'. And I'm not convinced that my colleagues and I teach any better than my non-PGCHE qualified lecturers did 15 or so years ago.

In fact, I'm not sure that the staff being made to take ever increasing responsibility for the students' learning (or attainment) is in any way a positive thing for the sector. What I see is an awful lot of students who are taking ever less responsibility for their own learning and who simply want to be entertained at all times. Going to the library and reading piles of papers and then thinking for yourself is not their idea of entertaining. So they come, completely unprepared (because that bit requires effort and isn't inherently fun), half-heartedly participate in whatever innovative activities people have planned for them, and then go away having decided that was all that was required of them. Then they complain because they haven't learned anything.

The odd student never appears in classes and does brilliantly because they've been in the library just getting on with it themselves (and are often very much put off by all the 'pretend an alien has arrived and you need to explain concept x to them', or 'draw a picture of someone in this particular situation and then share it with your neighbour' type activities that the PGCHE classes insist that are what we should be doing). And lots and lots of students have come to classes where they've drawn a lot of pictures and spider diagrams and made posters, talked about what their nan said about topic y, and sat through uncomfortable silences whenever the discussion of anything they're supposed to have read comes up, but have almost no idea how any of this relates to the academic discipline they're supposed to be doing a degree in.

I know we're supposed to embrace the whole, universities have gotten so much better at teaching narrative. But I think much of it is a myth.

I've never really got over one of my former academic colleagues telling me that at one of his first meetings with the MSc student whose dissertation he was going to supervise, the student came in and said 'You know that list of articles you said to read? Well, I tried but I couldn't understand them. Can we go through them and you can tell me what they're about?' This particular student had a 2.1 from a redbrick university. The academic references submitted with the application were OK. However, on delving further it turned out that the student's undergrad dissertation had been on an aspect of a research project carried out by a group of students. Our student had done some of the organising and testing but none of the statistical analysis of the results. Another student who was good at that sort of thing had done that bit. No wonder our student was struggling and went on to fail a key exam.

We had another student once who said in a meeting 'I should be getting better grades than this and it's your fault that I'm not!' - meaning by 'you', the academic staff and the institution. This particular student habitually submitted essays the day before they were due, which I mention because every single time the essays came back from the marker I (the administrator) noticed that the first comment would be 'You lost marks because there were many careless errors of spelling, grammar and punctuation. You should make the time to proofread your work before submission.' Quite clearly, Moany Student was either not bothering to read the feedback or had decided the markers didn't know what they were talking about.

Disheartening, really.

Nobody should underestimate the improvement in learning and teaching in the HE sector over the last decade, and the impact this has had on attainment levels.

I think there has been zero improvement in my subject and training in teaching has had almost zero effect (apart from wasting a lot of time). The highest rated teaching (highest rated by both staff and students) frequently comes from those who haven't had training in the UK.

It's another thing which seems to vary a great deal between subjects.

I take your point, but I guess it depends on how seriously your institution takes the PGCHE calamitous. Our provision was quite woeful when we started 15 years ago, but it has been heavily invested in over the last five years (new programme-specific research-active teaching staff for a start). I would be concerned about a PGCHE (or similar) being pitched or interpreted as increasing staff responsibility for student learning, when it should be promoting strategies for independent learning.

At the heart of all of this IMO is how fees had changed relationships in the HE sector. I feel increasingly pressured to "provide answers", rather than "facilitate independent study" as students (and, more often, parents) see "stuff" (such as endless module handbooks, readers etc) as constituting "value for money". The reporting about "contact hours" makes me want to scream too.

One seminar group was having a moan about printing costs recently, and how unfair it is given that they paid £9,000 per academic year. One of their number piped-up that they had not actually paid anything yet, and quite a lot of them might never pay anything back which made me chortle. Anyway, they were quite surprised to learn that our budget has not increased with tuition fees - it barely covers the gap that has arisen following the withdrawl of central funding in 2012.

I think that we would be a lot better-off promoting what we are good at and why it should be valued as a unified sector (a swerve away from "employability" would be great). I guess exposure to market forces make that unlikely though, as indicated the rise and rise of discrete groups (e.g. RG).

Sorry about going rather off-topic!

The thing is, the people at my institution who see themselves as teaching and learning specialists (and who deliver the pgche) genuinely believe in what they're doing. They take it super seriously.

However, I've been involved in class sessions run by a group of teaching and learning specialists (and I have to run a module for the students who take their module at the same time) and there is almost no learning going on. There's a lot of activity and laughing and joking and making it all fun (which, they're very clear to us when they deliver training, is the important thing because you won't take it in otherwise), but the students absolutely do not have even a basic grasp of the key concepts covered by the module. They can't name a single key theorists or reliably define key terminology. They can tell you a lot about what their nan says about stuff or what their own preconceived ideas are or even that colleague A made a joke, but cannot go beyond that. So they're in exactly the position they were in before they came to us.

None if this helps them to gain independent learning skills and it certainly doesn't help them produce acceptable assignments. I've marked the assignments and the knowledge and understanding is not there (nor is there much evidence of reading).

Although it's good to hear that more uni lecturers now have teaching qualifications, however, I assume that this is only part of the reason why results have increased.
Unis now tend to have modular degree courses with exams in both Jan and June which has probably improved marks also. There are also opportunities to resit which was practically unheard of 20+ years ago. There may also be more assessed coursework or for Science degrees the final project may count for a greater percentage of the mark. Most students these days do tend to be more aware of how modular assessments work i.e. how much each exam or piece of coursework contributes towards a degree so this would also boost performance.
Course content would also change over the years to reflect new developments but whether this makes it easier or not is hard to work out.

There's also the fact that, rather than handing you some essay questions (with a reading list if you were lucky) or telling you to formulate your own question and then leaving you to get on with it, coursework now involves multiple class sessions going over the assignment, and working in specific parts of it, and then having the lecturer look at your plan (even having them look over your draft before you submit it). Even after a that, you get to email your lecturer several times for clarification and arrange one-to-one meetings to further clarify the assignment. Then the office will automatically give you an extension (on the vaguest pretext).

Once you've received written feedback on it, you get to have dedicated sessions in the class to further clarify this and one-to-one meetings with the marker and/or your personal tutor to discuss the feedback and how it relates to the assignments coming up.

And, you don't actually 'fail' until after you've had the chance to resubmit (with additional support for this resubmission). I used to work on a programme where students were allowed multiple attempts at assignments (each time with additional one-to-one staff support as well as very detailed written feedback) and the resubmission marks weren't capped in any way.

All of that is likely to impact on your ability to get a good mark in an assignment. When there are no exams at all (not even of the kind where you've seen the questions beforehand), you can be nurtured through every bit of assessed work in your degree in this way.

I've never done a formal teaching qualification in my life, but I'm an excellent teacher.

I have, however, been on several training courses (1 or 2 day things) which have been delivered by incompetent teacher-trainers. I won't do them any more.

There are higher numbers of upper level degree classifications (1st and upper Seconds). I'm not sure that this is inflation.

It is, as someone says upthread, because in the past we thought pf the top mark possible as 70 or 72% (ie just squeaking into the First class). Now we use a greater range of marks -- both upward and downward.

And in my institution/s & field (always worked at an RG in humanities) at least we don't mark to a bell curve. We use what's called 'criteria referenced' marking. So if it's good enough, it's good enough, that is: it meets the assessment criteria and the grade descriptors -- and we're not limited in the marks we award by the prescription of pre-ordained patterns of marks awarded.

And I think that if you ask an expert, this is also why A Level grades appear to have been inflated. The marking systems have moved from a prescribed distribution pattern (the bell curve pattern) to criteria referenced marking.

YY. The standard of teaching in the PGCHE provision I've been on has often been dire. At the last one, we all noted the irony over lunch.

Our marking criteria get ever easier. Curently, you can get a high 2:2 in our marking scheme without even fully addressing the bloody question. It means that anyone who actually answers the question should get a 2:1, no matter how bare that answer is.