In order to curb the trend, experts who assess higher education providers for the government’s university ratings system will be asked to look at the percentage of firsts and 2:1s awarded by each institution. If judged excessive, the university could be downgraded.
Universities will be discouraged from inflating students’ results with ‘grade inflation’ one of the key criteria institutions will be measured against in the government’s national rating system.
The Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework (TEF) rates universities with gold, silver or bronze scores based on a number of criteria including their overall provision, student experience, teaching quality and whether courses are sufficiently stretching enough – the government is also piloting a subject specific version of it.
There will be no set targets but assessors will be asked to review the number of firsts and 2:1s each university has awarded over recent years and decide whether there has been unacceptable grade inflation.
The measure will be trialled in a series of pilots in 50 institutions this year, before being formally included and used to inform university ratings in the summer of 2020.
Key Findings:
- The data shows that last year 26 per cent of students gained a first class degree, a rise of two per cent from the previous year, and up from 18 per cent in 2012-13.
- Currently, universities and colleges use a range of marks achieved by students to determine the final grade of degree. Due to the autonomous nature of UK universities, these can vary between providers and subjects.
- British universities have been handing out higher-class degrees at an unprecedented rate over the past decade, with at least one university issuing five times as many first-class degrees last year as it did a decade before.
- In the 2006-7 academic year at the University of Wolverhampton 175 students (5% of the total) were awarded first-class degrees. In 2016-17, 973 students (28% of the total) were awarded firsts.
- In contrast, at Warwick University the proportion of first-class degrees rose from 22% in 2006-7 to 27% a decade later and the proportion of 2:1s remained the same at 54%. Surrey University awarded firsts to 41% of its graduates last year, Oxford 33% and Cambridge 32%.
Further data from the publication, ‘A degree of uncertainty’ from Reform:
- In the mid-1990s there was no detectable ‘grade inflation’ at all, with 7 per cent of students awarded a First-class honours (‘First’), yet the upward trend in Firsts being awarded to students over the last two decades has been unrelenting. From 1997 to 2009 the proportion of Firsts almost doubled from 7 to 13 per cent, and in just seven years since 2010 the proportion of Firsts has doubled again from 13 to 26 per cent (climbing from 22 to 26 per cent in the last year alone).
- The percentage of students being awarded a 2:1 has also risen from 40 to 49 per cent since 1995, meaning that the proportion of students awarded either a First or 2:1 has increased from 47 to 75 per cent over this period.
- Of those institutions with more than 1,000 students completing their degree last year, Imperial College London tops the list at 45 per cent of their students being awarded a First, closely followed by the University of Surrey on 44 per cent.
- There are now 40 institutions (a quarter of all HE providers) that award Firsts to at least 30 per cent of their students.
- 54 institutions have seen their proportion of Firsts double or triple since 2010 (Southampton Solent University and the University of the West of Scotland even saw their proportion more than quadruple).
- Seven institutions have seen their proportion of Firsts rise by over 20 percentage points since 2010.
- Some large institutions still award a relatively small proportion of Firsts. Bath Spa University and the University of Chichester jointly award the lowest proportion at 15 per cent.