Academic standards are in decline in many British universities. Students who would once have been failed their degrees pass, and students who would once have been awarded respectable lower seconds are now awarded upper seconds and even firsts.

Students - British as well as those from overseas - commence their studies with levels of English so poor that universities run remedial English courses to ensure at least basic literacy. Cheating is rampant, encouraged partly by lenient penalties.

How do I know all this? Part of the evidence is statistical. Over the past decade the number of firsts has more than doubled, while the undergraduate population has increased by less than a half. The standard leaving qualification for most students is now an upper second - the lower second is an endangered species and the third on the verge of extinction.

A recent survey by the Higher Education Academy suggested that, of 9,000 or so cases of plagiarism recorded last year, only 143 resulted in expulsion. The survey pointed to an alarming variation in penalties. In many mainly post-1992 “new” universities, lecturers must take national, ethnic and even social background into account when punishing cheaters.

But statistical evidence is no more than a signpost. In recent years I have become alarmed and depressed at the number of inquiries I receive from usually young scholars just embarking on their careers and coming under intolerable managerial pressure to pass students who should fail and to “massage” students into higher qualifications.

It is not only probationer lecturers who are victims. Last year Paul Buckland, Professor of Environmental Archaeology at Bournemouth University, resigned in protest at the decision of university authorities that 13 students whom he - and a formal examinations board - judged to have failed a course should be passed. In so doing, the authorities appear to have endorsed the view of a senior official - an official, mind you, not an academic - that students should have been able to pass merely on the basis of lecture notes, without doing the required reading.

Universities UK should have issued a formal public rebuke. Its silence on this and similar cases is a scandal. Faced with criticism that academic standards are being dumbed down, British vice-chancellors customarily point to the external examiner system as a guarantee that it cannot happen.

It can and does. In the typically modularised degree system run by the now typical university, external examiners - academic specialists from other institutions - no longer oversee the entire assessment process, and are not permitted to review individual grades. Their job, at most, is simply to ensure as best they can that correct procedures are applied. To quote from an e-mail I received yesterday from an external examiner, “the externals are not permitted to alter marks or comment on individual scripts in any way. Their function is to comment merely on adherence to procedures. I complained about this repeatedly, to no avail.”

How has higher education got itself into this mess? An insidious managerial culture obsessed with league tables and newspaper rankings is partly to blame. The more firsts and upper seconds a university awards, the higher its ranking is likely to be. So each university looks closely at the grading criteria used by its near rivals in the league tables, and if they are using more lenient schemes, the argument is put about that “peer” institutions must do the same. The upholding of academic standards is replaced by a grotesque “bidding” game, in which standards are sacrificed on the altar of public image, as reflected in the rankings.

This is only part of the problem. League tables are here to stay. A robust university management, however jealous for its own reputation, will never let them dictate the terms upon which its guards its academic standards. Part of the problem stems from gross underfunding. Non-EU students attract full fees, and have become a lucrative source of cash. Failing or expelling a non-EU student can have serious implications. Was this, I wonder, why at one university last year, a lecturer was criticised for neglecting to give “token credits” to failures? In the modern, mass higher education system, there must be prizes for all, because the student is the customer and the customer must have something for his money.

What can be done about these evils? British universities are self-regulating, and I would not want it any other way. But with self-regulation comes responsibility. The representative bodies, and the Quality Assurance Agency to which all their members subscribe, should summon the courage to name and shame miscreant institutions, and perhaps even to suspend them.

Ultimately, the buck stops in the vice-chancellor's office and with the governing body that is legally responsible for the general character of the education at the university. Quality in higher education cannot be reduced to a simplistic rankings list, however appealing rankings may be to newspapers and their readers, not to mention university governors whose attention span (it seems) cannot extend beyond a set of numerical performance indicators.

When a professor says that a student should fail, the wise vice-chancellor will support that decision, and the governors will publicly congratulate both for putting first standards rather than student retention and “customer satisfaction”.

Geoffrey Alderman is Professor of Politics and Contemporary History at the University of Buckingham and a former chairman of the University of London's academic council

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