As I settle down to my huge pile of final exam scripts, I’m steeling myself to resist the pressure that now afflicts every academic I know: the temptation to give my students higher grades than those they would have received for the same quality of work 20 or even 10 years ago.

It’s partly a matter of expectation: we all know that anything less than an upper second will see our students consigned to the job scrapheap. Scan the ads and every graduate employer, from banks to the civil service, is demanding “at least an upper second”. You even need a 2:1 to be accepted onto certain colleges’ one-year teacher training courses.

I sometimes think that it’s just more trouble than it’s worth to give a 58% mark these days, since that equates to a 2:2. In my student days the old “Desmond” (short for “Desmond Tutu”, the rhyming slang for a 2:2) was a respectable degree, but it’s becoming an endangered species, no doubt soon to go the way of that exotic gentlemanly beast, the third.

Not so long ago, when the degree results were posted on notice boards at universities across the country, there would have been a little row of firsts at the top, then more or less equally sized blocks of 2:1s and 2:2s. Not any more. Nowadays there are far more firsts and upper seconds being awarded than in the past - and far fewer lower seconds and hardly any thirds.

Degrees - just like A-levels - have become easier over the past two decades. Grade inflation has infected the system. The proportion of firsts at the top universities used to be 10% at most. Now it’s closer to 20%. Some of this can be put down to the fact that students are harder working and more focused on results than they were a generation ago. However, that cannot be the whole story. Given that a higher proportion of the population is going into higher education, you’d expect intuitively that there would be more weaker students, not fewer. There simply can’t be twice as many brilliant young minds now as there were just a few years ago.

Part of the problem is that since students are paying towards their university education themselves, they expect the kind of customer service offered by the private sector: if we do not “deliver” them a 2:1, that’s our fault and they can – and do – take their complaints to the independent ombudsman for universities. I’ve just checked and there are currently two such (anonymised) complainants featured as examples on the ombudsman’s website. Their grievance? They felt they deserved an upper rather than a lower second.

I was speaking recently to the head of a big department at a well-respected university, and he told me he has a steady stream of students knocking on the door and challenging their marks. Surely this is a 62, they say, not a 58 – or a 70, not a 68. The same thing has happened to me. It is a new phenomenon, which I’ve only previously experienced in the “market economy” of American universities.

What is more, the number of students requesting that their degree marks be inflated because of “mitigating circumstances”, such as illness or even the death of a pet, is also on the increase. Borderline students have an uncanny way of suddenly remembering, just as they receive their disappointing results, how granny popped her clogs the day their exams started.

There’s pressure from the other end too: there are universities where instructions go round to staff reminding them that awarding more top-class degrees will push their institution up both the national and international league tables. When I was a professor at Liverpool University, heads of departments were given exactly this message. An analysis had been done of the factors contributing to Liverpool’s league table position (which some considered unfairly low). Heads of departments were told that improving Liverpool’s ranking partly relied on awarding more first and upper second-class degrees.

One expert estimates that about 10% of a university’s league table total score depends on how many top degrees it hands out. Last year, 19 of the top 30 universities in The Sunday Times Good University Guide awarded at least 10% more firsts and upper seconds than eight years ago. Liverpool’s rise equates to a 34% increase in top degrees, with Sussex registering a 37.9% increase and Southampton a 36.4% increase.

The truth is that there are now so many 2:1s that it is grossly unfair on the students who narrowly miss a first to be lumped in with those who have scraped a low 2:1 and who not so long ago would have got a 2:2. Our degree system has become so crude it is almost meaningless. What’s the point of having a system with four divisions when the two lower ones are hardly ever used?

I would like to see a new system, more like that used in America, where students get a grade point average, based on performance throughout their time at university. That won’t stop the complaints and the demands for remarking, but at least it would offer finer discrimination.

Other academics such as Alan Smithers, the director of the centre for education and employment research at Buckingham University, have suggested introducing two new categories of degree classification: starred firsts (which some universities have, but use very sparingly) and starred upper seconds to give everyone more information about students and what they have achieved. It’s all uncannily reminiscent of the current debate about A-level grade inflation and how to find really meaningful ways of high-lighting genuine achievement.

Jonathan Bate, professor of Shakespeare and renaissance literature at Warwick University, was speaking to Sian Griffiths

Rise in awards

Proportional increase in upper second and first-class degrees from 1999 to 2007 at 10 of the top 30 British universities

1 Sussex 37.9%
2 Southampton 36.4%
3 Liverpool 34%
4 Leicester 32.7%
5 Durham 23.4%
6 Exeter 23.1%
7 York 19%
8 Newcastle 18.3%
9= Sheffield 18%
9= Leeds 18%

Source: The Sunday Times University Guide

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