Why Reform’s “solution” to university grade inflation will not work

In an earlier piece I explained why rampant grade inflation at British universities exists. It is best understood as “market failure”, a side effect of the intensifying marketisation of higher education, whereby universities must compete for student fee income by making themselves more attractive to would-be “customers”. I wrote this before the publication of a new report by the pro-market think tank Reform, A Degree of Uncertainty, which has captured headlines this week. The report is thorough, providing a devastating description of the problem and the often wilful failure of existing quality assurance mechanisms to address it. However, the report is also symptomatic of the domination of neoliberal logics in policy thinking, leading to a totally inadequate understanding of the problem and inappropriate solutions.

In the section asking why grade inflation exists (section 2), the author, Tom Richmond, repeatedly denies or skirts around the key issues. He discounts league tables as a factor because league tables pre-date grade inflation. However, this ignores the way that the impact of league tables is mediated by other factors. In an era when competition between universities was relatively contained, league tables did not drive grade inflation. However, in the post-1998 era of tuition fees, when universities’ finances start to be linked directly to student recruitment, league tables start to play a very different role. Particularly with the post-2011 introduction of £9,000 fees, the abolition of direct government funding for teaching, and the lifting of the cap on student recruitment, enabling some universities to expand at the expense of others, the situation changed quite radically. The author concedes that grade inflation seems correlated with rising fees, but again does not link this to reforms in HE governance, i.e. the abolition of direct funding for teaching that makes universities now reliant on attracting student-consumers.

A telling passage is Richmond’s remark on p.20:

even if increasing student numbers, a shift towards consumerism, league tables and tuition fees all play a role in grade inflation, the inflation itself must be driven by factors that directly translate into universities awarding higher marks. After all, a truly effective and rigorous degree classification system should be entirely unaffected by these external pressures.

This is clearly a ludicrous comment. As I explained in my post, recent changes to the UK’s HE funding regime have deliberately made universities depend overwhelmingly on student fees for their financial survival. This was deliberate precisely because neoliberal policymakers believe that “empowering” students to behave like savvy customers would “drive up quality” among “providers” by making them compete to attract students. This was implicit in the HE reforms of the coalition government under David Cameron, and absolutely explicit in the government’s Green Paper (2015) and White Paper (2016), which laid the basis for the 2017 Higher Education and Research Act. Many of us warned at the time that this was complete nonsense: a threat to universities’ financial survival would cause them to (further) degrade standards just to secure their position. The Reform report completely ignores these changes in the HE funding landscape. Yet it is these changes that provide mechanisms that “directly translate into universities awarding higher marks”.

It is only by ignoring these structural factors that Richmond can pin the blame on the lack of an “effective and rigorous degree classification system”. The blame is thereby transferred to universities alone, for their institutional failures, and accordingly an institutional solution — more external discipline and better market regulation — is proposed. This is a classical neoliberal move. The fundamental origins of the problem in the market cannot be admitted, because markets are, by default, considered to be good. This immediately mystifies the problem by failing to explain why professional educators would be degrading the quality of their own professional practice. In neoliberal thinking, suboptimal outcomes can only be understood as wilful distortions of the market by poor regulation, or producer interests. Accordingly, the solution is to introduce better regulation to suppress these “spoilers”. As long as we get the institutions “right”, the market will produce the desired outcomes. This approach is widely recognised in critical studies of neoliberal policymaking across the world, best captured (to my mind) in the work of Jamie Peck and his colleagues. In successive “waves” of neoliberalism, failures of market-making at time point A lead not to a reconsideration of the merits of the market, but deeper marketisation at time point B, with new experiments in market regulation to “fix” the problem.

It is unsurprising, then, that Richmond suggests technical changes to the regulation of the UK HE market to address grade inflation. Equally unsurprising is the fact that these proposed “solutions” would only re-present the problem in a new form, requiring further tweaking of regulation in the future, in an endless cycle of wilful blindness to the real origins of the crisis.

Richmond’s idea is basically twofold. First, universities should be compelled by the regulator, the “Office for Students”, to appoint a “designated assessment body” (DAB) for each subject area. These DABs would be dominated by employers — so-called “end users” of qualifications — with an interest in maintaining standards. Second, DABs would then set the standards for “core curriculum”, and set and organise the marking of a nationwide examination. This could count for up to 10% of students’ final classifications but, more importantly, it would set a benchmark to determine how many degrees each institution is allowed to award at each classification level. Nationwide, there would be a fixed proportion of 10% Firsts, 40% 2(i)s, 40% 2(ii)s, and 10% Thirds, with each institution told how many it could award depending on how its students do in the “core curriculum” exam.

The flaws with this approach should be obvious. First, it is far from clear who could possibly serve as DABs in most subject areas. For the professions and vocational degrees, professional bodies exist, some already with a regulatory role; but who would be the DAB for, say, mathematics, or sociology? Second, if employers are to determine the “core curriculum” of subject areas, what impact would this have on academic autonomy and critical approaches to teaching? Yet again, the public functions of higher education are being evacuated, with university degrees reduced to qualifications useful for employers. Third, why should a student’s understanding of one part of a course’s subject matter determine the extent of their understanding of other parts? Students often demonstrate a better grasp of some aspects than others, and it is clearly unfair to suggest that their overall attainment should not reflect this.

Finally and most importantly, this scheme will clearly only cause the problem of grade inflation to morph into new forms of market failure. If students’ degree results — and universities’ consequent league table position and accordingly their financial survival — comes to depend on any sort of common test, whether degree specific or in the form of proposed tests of “learning gain”, the gaming of the system will simply be reoriented to this test. The proposed national exam may only “count” notionally for 10% of the overall grade, but if it comes to determine the overall spread of classifications at each institution, universities will simply begin teaching students how to excel at this test. Class time that ought to be spent on proper subject matter will instead be given over to this. The so-called “core curriculum” will become the be-all and end-all of university education. We do not need to imagine how this works — we can directly observe it already in secondary education, where the tyranny of league tables, coupled with the abolition of professional autonomy through an nationwide curriculum and examinations system, has evacuated non-“core” elements from the timetable and forced educators to teach to the test. Naturally this is destructive of genuine education.

Were Richmond’s idea to be adopted, then, in a few years time we would all be moaning about the gaming of the nationwide exam system. This would prompt calls for yet more institutional reforms to suppress this problem, leading to yet another round of idiotic “fixes” that would again simply shift the crisis into a new form.

The challenge of grade inflation is not an institutional problem but an ethical one. During the BSE crisis, I recall seeing a documentary that exposed farmers feeding cow remains, including brains, to their living cows, which was thought to be a vector of the disease’s spread. Agriculturalists explained how no self-respecting farmer would willingly engage in this horrific practice, but they were forced to do it by low “gate” prices paid by supermarkets, whose oligopolistic market power allows them to keep farmers’ margins razor-thin.

The same logic applies to HE. No self-respecting academic wants to hand out grades that are not well-deserved. Their personal and professional integrity hinges on a shared notion of academic standards. In our research work, for example, we routinely “peer review” each other’s papers to ensure that the correct procedures have been followed in terms of ethics, data gathering and interpretation, to guarantee that the findings are robust. However, as the pressure to publish has mounted —also driven by marketisation and external auditing regimes like the Research Excellence Framework — we have seen spiralling rates of scientific fraud, with numerous scandals around replicability and a mounting rate of retractions of scholarly papers.

Grade inflation is simply the analogue of this process on the educational side of academia. When we mark work, we try to be fair and rigorous, assessing it against collectively agreed criteria. We second-mark or moderate each other’s grading to ensure it is rigorous and fair. We subject our grading to external examiners’ scrutiny for the same purpose. The whole system of self-regulation, which dates back to the early 19th century, is built around ensuring integrity and upholding shared norms of rigour and fairness. However, when this system of professional ethics comes into conflict with the material survival of the institution where we work (and thereby our own subsistence), unsurprisingly it is this system that must buckle. Integrity must take second place to “pragmatism”. Whether through gradual adaptation or brute coercion, many academics cease to be self-respecting: fully aware that what they are doing is ethically incorrect, but seeing no way to behave ethically in the modern university, they become resigned to their fate and simply try to eke out some space to do things they consider valuable, whether mentoring students or quietly getting on with their research. Others deal with the cognitive dissonance by adopting false consciousness, convincing themselves and others (against all the evidence) that students are “working harder”, or that there is something socially progressive about helping students “get on” in the labour market.

The problem of grade inflation, then, is that the institutional structures and pressures created by marketisation are not aligned with ethical conduct and professional integrity; indeed, they make these things impossible, forcing good people to behave in ways that even they know are incorrigable. This is not unique to the issue of grade inflation, or even to academia; it is rife throughout capitalist society. The farmer who feeds cow brains to his cows; the banker who crashes an economy to gain a higher bonus; the small business owner who uses zero-hours contracts to assist their bottom line — most of these people know full well, deep down, that what they are doing is wrong, yet they feel, often correctly, that they have little or no choice. Others refuse to confront this dissonance; some even seem to cope with it blithely and smoothly. But perhaps even they, in the depths of the night, lying awake and staring at the ceiling, feel the existential angst created by the clash between the human need to be ethical and the dreadful imperatives of capitalist competition.