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Statistics recently released across all British universities show that, over the past decade, the proportion of students gaining a first class degree has nearly doubled, from 11% in 2003-4 to 19% in 2012-13. The proportion of students attaining a 2.1 has also increased. Research at Lancaster University's School of Management argues that this simply reflects the rising quality of A-level students. Others have suggested that this may be evidence of "dishonesty", as universities chase league table recognition. Who is right?
The dishonesty argument hinges on university autonomy; a university that has degree awarding powers sets its own standards and could, in theory, manipulate them. In practice, though, there is a long-developed system of checks and balances that set levels of parity across broad networks of universities.
The external examination system is central to this. A broad range of external accrediting bodies, mostly for the professions, impose specific sets of requirements. And the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) audits every university on a regular basis, looking in particular at the ways in which appropriate standards are implemented.
Every university that I know takes these assurance systems very seriously; in my university, I read every external examiner report for all our academic programmes. No system is perfect. But the argument that universities are dishonestly manipulating results is both lazy and ill-informed.
So why is the proportion of good degrees going up? Research such as the Lancaster study is important, because we don't know enough about the relationship between students' inherent abilities, the value that is added through the opportunities universities provide and the systems we use to measure these factors. There is no golden age of grading, despite nostalgia for a time when only a few students attained a first.
Back in the day, assessment took the form of an endurance race through five successive days of written papers and no-one would ever get more than 80%. It was never clear what was actually being assessed, other than the ability to remember a huge amount and write almost continually for five days. The stakes were much lower; since less than 10% of school levers went to any university, the employment advantage was gained by getting in, and getting out with something. People with third class degrees got jobs along with a reputation for valuing a good social life.
Today, this age of innocence is long gone. Students are schooled to worry about employment before they start university. With the majority of their contemporaries going on to post-compulsory education, the stakes are immensely higher and students work much harder. So one reason why there is an increasing proportion of graduates with good degrees is simply that they deserve them. Looked at it another way, it would be profoundly unfair to pile on all the pressure for attainment while continually moving the finishing line further towards the horizon.
In addition, assessment has become a lot more sophisticated, and appropriately so. There needs to be a sensible balance between formative assessment (coursework) and summative assessment (final examinations). Students today are not at university to be "filled up" with knowledge. Rather, they want the opportunity to develop advanced analytical techniques to make sense of an increasingly complex world, awash with information. This requires experiential learning, melding theory and principles with applications, and this in turn leads to a blend of assessment methods that measure students' abilities more closely. So golden age comparisons are setting very different worlds of learning against each other, as if they are comparable.
This said, the Lancaster study is, in itself, an inadequate explanation. Firstly, it misses the point that only about half of students in British Higher education have A-levels. Significant numbers of students enter university from further education colleges, with vocational qualifications. Secondly, it ignores the compelling evidence – lined up by the Sutton Trust and in other studies – that A-level attainment is correlated with socioeconomic status and household income. And, of course, A-level assessment methods have themselves changed dramatically over the past decades. We cannot, then, turn to A-levels for a simple assurance nothing has changed.
What is needed? We are probably nearing the point where traditional degree classifications will be abandoned. We should rather look for reliable, secure and trusted ways of providing our students with comprehensive transcripts of everything they have done at university. Because employers increasingly demand all this additional information in any case, we need to find ways of providing them with the best possible means of expressing a graduate's full range of capabilities, work and attainment while at university. This would be fairer to our students, more useful to employers and better than an arcane system of degree classification that is outliving its usefulness.
Martin Hall is vice-chancellor of the University of Salford – follow him on Twitter @VCSalford
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