Dumb and Dumber

As the ritual annual self-flagellation over A level results reaches fever pitch, my mind turned to a story that I came across in the Telegraph a couple of weeks ago. It turns out that universities, amongst the main critics of the rising A level pass rate, may themselves be guilty of ‘dumbing down'.

According to the Telegraph, over the last ten years or so the proportion of students gaining firsts almost doubled, with upper seconds rising by a more modest 8%. The proportion of students therefore gaining ‘good’ degrees rose from 52.2% of the student body in 1997 to 61.4% last year, an 18% rise. The increase is even more marked if we go back to the 1980s when only a third of students gained the top two degree classifications.

In many ways this seems surprising. Universities are constantly bemoaning the declining skills of undergraduates caused by ‘satnav’ A level qualifications. Reports allege that students "lack the basic ability to express themselves in writing", and that there has been an “alarming decline” in numeracy standards. At the same time, the expansion of university education (numbers rising from 23% of under 21s in 1991 towards the government’s target of 50%) must surely imply some dilution of quality. In this light, one would surely expect a reduction in the number of 'good' degrees rather than the large increase we have seen.

It is possible, of course that universities are simply getting better at preparing undergraduates for their final degrees, but the evidence is that more and more universities are making use of postgraduates for teaching rather than their ‘big name’ academics. At the same time an increasingly market-driven environment is also leading to inexorable upward pressure on degree classes.

This pressure comes from two main sources, the external market and the internal one. Firstly, as discussed in an earlier post, university league tables include the proportion of good degrees as part of their ranking – with students being increasingly aware of the tables, a good ranking is important for recruitment and, by extension, funding. A leaked email from Manchester Metropolitan university last year showed how these pressures were brought to bear. The email, to Maths and Computing staff, says: "As a university we do not award as many Firsts and 2:1s as other comparable institutions so there is an understandable desire to increase the proportion of such awards. Please bear this in mind when setting your second and final year assessments, especially the latter." As hints go, this is a pretty broad one.

The internal market also exerts pressures – universities will close down courses that are not ‘economically viable’, essentially meaning having lots of students on them. If you want to keep your job, you need to run a course, and students are unlikely to sign up for courses in which high grades are difficult to acquire, leading to a beauty contest between different courses within degree programmes.

As a consequence, universities' protests at A level grade inflation making life difficult for them begin to ring a little hollow, as the same criticisms are now being levelled at them by prospective employers. Indeed, there have been some reports suggesting that degrees have become so devalued that employers prefer to look at university graduates' A level grades as being a better discriminator than degree class! A worrying development, given the rising cost of studying.

It is perhaps surprising, therefore, that at the very time when A level grades are being benchmarked against the students' GCSE background, to try to mitigate against grade inflation, universities are resisting any attempts to introduce greater rigour into their own procedures - since the demise of the CNAA (after polytechnics became universities back in 1992) each university has set its own standards with no over-arching supervision. Pots and kettles come to mind.