Marketisation is destroying academic standards through rampant grade inflation
The long summer exam season of British universities is finally drawing to a close. But many academics may be wondering why they spent many weeks carefully grading exams — and, before that, months marking other assignments — when academic standards are being constantly eroded by rampant grade inflation.
The evidence for this is now overwhelming. Last year, 26 percent of students graduated with a First, and 49 percent with an Upper Second-class (2(i)) degree. In 1994/5, when data collection first began, the figures were 7 and 40 percent. The proportion getting these “good honours” has risen from less than half to over three quarters. The proportion of Firsts has nearly quadrupled. Failure has been practically abolished.
How do we know this isn’t because students are simply getting better? Because the vast majority of the increase has happened in the last five years. There have been no recent revolutions in secondary education that could explain such a miraculous increase in students’ abilities. Nor is there any evidence that students are studying harder, despite sky-high fees. Undergraduates now commit, on average, fewer than 14 hours per week to independent study, a figure that is declining year on year — partly because so many are forced to work part-time just to survive.
Conversely, there have been radical changes in the governance of Higher Education. Specifically, the government has abolished most public funding, tripled tuition fees, and dramatically intensified marketisation and competition.
Most universities now rely heavily on student fees. Their very survival depends upon satisfying 18–21-year-olds whom the government encourages to behave as savvy “consumers”. Pleasing them is now imperative.
This isn’t just about bolshie students demanding higher grades — though they certainly do this more frequently now. More importantly, the corrosion of academic standards is built into the very market structures created by the government — even as it simultaneously lamented grade inflation.
League tables are a crucial mechanism through which market pressures operate. One widely used metric is “value added”, a toe-curling term denoting the gap between the qualifications students enters university with, and their final degree classifications. “Value added” is heavily weighted in many league tables, being used as a crude proxy for “teaching quality”.
Genuinely improving student attainment is hard, because it is shaped by many factors beyond lecturers’ control, like students’ background, home life, income, mental health, personal commitment, and so on. These factors are never accounted for in league tables. Conversely, it is very easy to improve a department’s “value added” score: simply award higher grades, so the gap between entry qualifications and degree classifications widens.
The National Student Survey (NSS) has a similar impact. NSS scores on feedback and “overall satisfaction” are incorporated into many league tables. Since NSS scores are correlated with degree results, one easy way to game them is to inflate grades. Many universities also cajole or bribe students to give good feedback, despite guidance to the contrary.
Since league tables heavily influence students’ choice of university, the temptation to fiddle one’s ranking is enormous. Moreover, when all of one’s “competitors” are doing the same, resistance becomes suicidal, risking falling student recruitment and financial collapse.
In theory, a department’s external examiners — academics recruited from other institutions to assessment procedures are rigorous — should arrest this vicious spiral. However, if their own universities are inflating grades, externals are unlikely to be critical, and may even admonish departments for falling behind.
Universities have internalised the existential threat of market competition by building grade inflation into assessment practices. Degree classifications are typically generated by algorithms that unevenly weight different years and modules. In a 2015 survey, 39 percent of universities admitted to having changed their algorithms since 2010 so that they did not “disadvantage students in comparison with students in similar institutions”.
Some new algorithms allow exam boards to arbitrarily re-weight years of study, so that a student who does worse in their final year than their second year, say, will suddenly have the weighting of those years swapped around. Elsewhere, weak module results may simply be discounted.
Additional mechanisms range from “nudging” to brute coercion. Lecturers are subtly and not-so-subtly encouraged to “use the full range of the marking scheme” (wink, wink). Those who don’t take the hint may be summoned to explain themselves to their superiors. Exam boards may also “rescale” module marks, arbitrarily adding points to meet institutional targets for “good honours”, or to “align” them with average module scores, thereby circumventing recalcitrant lecturers. Academics may also be forced to mark on a “curve”, awarding fixed quotas of Firsts and Upper/ Lower Seconds, with lower grades prohibited entirely (prizes for all: literally no-one may fail).
Ironically, lecturers who try to defend academic standards are often subjected to attacks on their professional integrity. They are told that they must not care about their students, since they are “disadvantaging” them for life. Their capacity to teach and assess students may also be questioned: since institutions cannot openly admit that they are inflating grades, blaming lecturers becomes imperative. If managers are being honest, they may invoke the need for “pragmatism” and imply that hold-outs are imperilling a department’s financial survival or the institution’s “reputation” (read: brand). Any residual objections are likely to be expunged from official records. As always, UK higher education combines the worst of the market with the worst of Stalinist bureaucracy.
The spineless managers and “scholars” who have embraced grade inflation deserve much of the blame for this crisis. Defending academic standards should be at the heart of what they do, but it rarely is. Getting “bums on seats” and keeping cash flowing through the institution is the real priority. If the government does try to solve this crisis by imposing some kind of national curriculum or assessment system, as is now being proposed, many university workers will have themselves to blame.
However, it is government policy that is primarily responsible for producing this crisis in the first place. By expanding higher education, successive governments have forced any youngster wanting a decent job to attend university, whether they like it or not. This makes students fixate upon — and deeply anxious about — grades, rather than genuine learning. The subsequent introduction of fees and intense market competition compels universities to revolve around the anxieties of these anxious consumers. In turn, this degrades what students are ostensibly there to do.
When “good honours” come so easily, many students disengage or coast, frustrating those who want a deep learning experience. Others, seeing how widely good honours are awarded, feel under intense competitive pressure, becoming deeply anxious about their own performance. Already trained to jump through hoops at school, many focus on pleasing lecturers, rather taking risks to work out their own ideas. Others, whether desperate or lazy, turn to cheating, risking disastrous consequences.
Although grade inflation is often undertaken in the name of “social justice” — ensuring “disadvantaged” cohorts can compete in the labour market — degrading academic standards only glosses over the inevitable inequalities of a massified higher education system. A generation of working-class students are being sold a university experience and degree that are ostensibly equal to those at the finest universities, on the promise of future employment opportunities. In reality, their experience is an increasingly degraded one, and nobody is really fooled. When qualifications no longer distinguish job candidates, employers fall back on other indicators, like universities’ reputations — favouring the relatively privileged graduates of “elite” institutions. Unsurprisingly, working-class graduates all too often end up in jobs that, 20 years ago, required only high-school-level qualifications, saddled with £50,000+ of debt.
There is no technical fix to this crisis in academic standards. Competition, with its imperative to attract and satisfy “customers”, is simply incompatible with the maintenance of rigorous, discriminating judgement. Unless the market is abolished, the value of degrees will continue to degrade until only the credentials of a handful of elite, high-reputation institutions are taken seriously — even where this is not deserved. Indeed, “elite” universities are often where grade inflation is most rampant.
For a follow-up on the Reform proposals to tackle grade inflation, see here.
