Are student demands for higher grades threatening standards?

That was a very frustrating read. Apart from Andy Grayson, there seems to be a lack of understanding of UK assessment practices in this article. Students cannot appeal grades, and normative marking, or adjustment of grades to get a certain percentage of firsts or other classifications, goes against the UK Quality Code.

With all respect to Andy, the claim that knowledge of the identities of “easy” and “hard” markers” is ‘fair’ whilst simultaneously acknowledging this knowledge will affect the decisions students make about which elective modules to study is naive at best and ignores the reality of a more commodified landscape of U.K. HE, perfectly highlighted by Sunak’s recent disparaging of ‘low value’ degrees. We clearly find ourselves competing for students. In turn, students will rationally seek optimal outcomes for their ROI by selecting modules with ‘better’ mark averages. The combination of market and individual pressures, however, is an insidious recipe for grade inflation. Something the OfS is urging universities to avoid.

(Degree) grade inflation seems to be the norm in the UK. As this piece highlights, there are many concurrent causes. It is not as simple as generous marking. Marketization of the system drives competition for students among universities. Recruiting success is linked to (frankly meaningless) league tables and various other assessment exercises. Many of these tables are strongly biased towards a ill-defined student satisfaction; it's the "customer is king" approach. The level of students coming into HE is overall lower than even just 10-12 years ago. To avoid large percentage of failures module syllabi are shorter/simpler and assessment is increasingly less challenging. This helps with reducing the number of fails but also allows many to step into the 2:1 or 1:1 class where they would have been one class below only few years ago. So it's not necessarily that we are marking more generously, we may be marking fairly but assessment has become less challenging. In the UK we have a marking scale out of 100 points but we rarely use the full range of marks available. Pass is mostly set at 40% (typically slightly higher for 4-year degrees), which is a disgrace. There is hardly any other assessment/test in any profession or aspect of life that would grant a pass with 4/10 correct answers. In most countries pass is at 50-60%. At the other end of the spectrum it's almost unheard that anybody may achieve 100/100. Using the full range of marks and awarding degrees based on the average or median mark (or some other meaningful statistic) over the 3/4 years would be a more sensible choice. Linked to the point above, assessment must be calibrated to meet the requirements of long term statistics, whose stability is wrongly interpreted as evidence of consistency in teaching and learning, and assessment over time. Degree marks in the UK are strongly biased towards final year performances. The first year hardly counts and the second year typically account for about 20%. To me, this is laughable and it sends the wrong message about the level of commitment required for HE. Universities increasingly treat students like restaurant customers; we give them everything they ask for (whether their requests are functional/beneficial to their education or not). HE is more akin to a gym, wanting to draw a real-world comparison. One can pay for the best equipment, personal trainer, diet supplements, etc. but if they do not put the hours and hard work in they are not going to get fit. Managing students expectations is a massive issue in most UK universities. The unmatched amount of bureaucracy in the UK HE system often causes Lecturers to opt for the easy solution when faced with any controversy. Lecturers have hardly any freedom left in setting assessment for their modules, marking and delivering feedback. Endless moderation exercises mean that the overall University system largely controls the outcome of degrees not the actual Lecturers. To be fair, Lecturers in the UK are mostly ok with this as, culturally, many like the "safety blanket" this type of system offers. If something doesn't;t work there is always somebody or something else to blame .... Too many optional choices for students in their degrees. Having optional modules and a selection of pathways is a good thing but in some cases we truly have gone mad. At some point in my Dept we had 21 different degree programmes and degree codes. This allows students to chose "cost-effective" combinations of modules, while imposing a massive admin and teaching load on the system, thus inevitably lowering standards. Combine the two effect and you'll have additional grade inflation. The number of students applying for mitigating circumstances or on some sort of support plan, referred to occupational health etc. is unbelievably high. It is great that we moved to more widely recognise these challenges but, perhaps, we have gone a bit too far. Too many students do not seem to be able to handle any form of pressure, and are incapable of managing their time as they are constantly offered a way out of the challenges they encounter. I am not sure whether this is a broader societal issue, a problem nonetheless.

I can remember countless of times when our marking teams were advised to be generous in their marking even if the work was below par. Markers have routinely been hauled over the coals for insisting the work is substandard. Having taught in international institutions, I find the British marking system open to manipulation in ways that do not happen in other countries. Plus, student attendance and performance is taken into account in grading but not in the UK. In fact, some universities are resistant to having a component of attendance and performance included in the grade. Can't imagine why.

This piece has the feel of being produced a long, long time after the horse has bolted. In England, pressure from management to inflate marks increased exponentially after 2012 when fees were trebled. It had started before that, but the pace really picked up at that point. Lecturers started being given targets in their appraisals for the proportion of their students who had to pass modules and achieve 'good' degrees. At one institution where I worked, markers from my department were pressured by an Associate Dean and a Faculty Registrar to re-mark some work so that even more students would achieve an upper-second-class degree or above - despite the fact that all the marks had been signed off by the external examiners. They were allowed to get away with declining only because the department was deemed already to have achieved its targets. This state of affairs has given rise also to the phenomenon of the lecturer who wants to ingratiate themselves with management by being seen to go furthest in inflating marks - in my experience, every department has one (or more). In recent years, the pressure has become one of dumbing down assessment as well by reducing summative assessment to avoid bunching of assessment or making students do 'too much' writing. This whole situation is completely unfair on students - who are held to lower standards in direct proportion to the more they have to pay - and to employers, when degree students are simply not getting the qualities of resilience, perseverance and the ability to overcome setbacks that they need to succeed post-graduation.

I have to say, I don't recognise the pressure to mark leniently expressed in many of the comments here. Our proportion of first has been more or less stable at about 25% the whole length of my time at my current institution, which is the same as it was at the institution I did my undergrad at 20 years ago. I've never been "pressured" into giving a higher mark, although I have been moderated up (as well as having been moderated down). Indeed, one of our assessments is marked by two people blindly, and of 60 or so students there are only ever 3 or 4 each year where to two grades are more than 6 marks out. I rarely hear complaints from our students about grades (although not so about feedback, whcih they would clearly all like much more of).

As someone else commented, the horse has already bolted; but it is encouraging to read the three articles by rare academics who are game and honest enough to tell the truth. As I have commented on an earlier article, grade inflation, especially from a fail to a pass, has been serious and destructive in Australia for many years. Too many compliant, unethical academics inflate grades to keep the dean and vice-chancellor happy, and so protect their careers while deceiving students (customers) and their backers into thinking the almost failure-free degree is as good as ever. They do not see it as irresponsible or dishonest to pass students by giving them marks they have not earned. For some soft assessment techniques used to ensure the customers get what they demand, see my article in the Higher Education Supplement of The Australian of 16 March 2011 (http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/opinion/weasel-words-and-the-soft-sell/story-e6frgcko-1226022023977). In most Australian business schools, and in other areas of the social sciences in particular, soft assessment is commonplace.