Staff at one of Britain’s largest universities have been urged to increase the number of top-level degree grades that they award to help it to compete with rival institutions.

An internal memo at Manchester Metropolitan University tells staff there is an “understandable desire” to increase the proportion of first-class and upper-second-class degrees, as it does not give out as many as other comparable universities.

It asks staff to “bear this in mind” when doing their student assessments.

The e-mail was sent by the university’s academic standards manager to maths and computing staff several months ago.

It said: “As a university we do not award as many firsts and 2:1s as other comparable institutions, so there is an understandable desire to increase the proportion of such awards.

“Please bear this in mind when setting your second and final-year assessments, especially the latter.”

It adds: “We have never received any external examiner criticism that our ‘standards’ are too low, so there should be quite a lot of leeway available to us all when assessments are set.”

The e-mail, obtained yesterday by the BBC News website, comes amid rising concerns about university standards and suggests that many universities are now feeling intense competitive pressures.

The number of students achieving a first-class degree has more than doubled since the mid1990s, with the proportion graduating with a first-class or 2:1 degree now 61 per cent.

At Manchester Metropolitan University, the proportion of students gaining a first or 2:1 rose from 47.4 per cent in 2001-02 to 51.3 per cent in 2006-07, according the data obtained from the Higher Education Statistics Agency for The Times Good University Guide.

Last week a report by the Quality Assurance Agency exposed doubts about the consistency of assessments and continuing difficulties with degree classification, which were branded “arbitrary and unreliable”.

A leading academic, Professor Geoffrey Alderman, has also claimed that degree standards are slipping because lecturers are under pressure to mark positively and turn a blind eye to plagiarism.

Professor Alderman, of the University of Buckingham, attributed the sharp rise in the number of firsts obtained to the “league table culture”.

There are also concerns that some universities are recruiting and passing overseas students, who do not always reach the required academic standard, purely because of the fee income they bring.

This year two senior lecturers at Kingston University in London were caught telling students to give their institution a glowing report in this year’s National Student Survey.

Phil Willis, chairman of the House of Commons Select Committee on Innovation, Universities and Skills, has said he will ask the committee to look into these issues when it meets this morning.

A spokesman for Manchester Metropolitan University confirmed last night that the e-mail was genuine, but said that it was an informal comment by a member of staff below the level of head of department sent to immediate colleagues. It was, he said, not an instruction.

“It is merely the interpretation of a single member of staff which reflects the increased awareness of comparable and publicly available statistics, and in no way relates to university policy.

“Decisions about degree classifications are made by boards of examiners in accordance with the university’s assessment regulations, which specify how classifications are determined,” he said.

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