Grade inflation is falling in Irish universities following a surge in the proportion of students being awarded first-class degrees over recent years, new figures show.
Across higher education institutions, 22.4 per cent of students were awarded a first-class honours degree in 2022-2023, according to Higher Education Authority data.
This is a drop of 2 per cent on the year before, when it stood at 24.4 per cent, and a drop of 6 per cent on the previous year, when it stood at 27.9 per cent, a record high.
While the proportion is down, it still represents a 40 per cent increase since 2015 when just 16 per cent achieved a first-class honours degree.
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The dramatic increase in top awards led some academics and recruiters to warn that the trend was making it difficult to differentiate between high-achieving students, while commentators warned that the integrity of college degrees could be in question.
It triggered an investigation by the State’s education standards watchdog, Quality and Qualifications Ireland, including discussions with universities on “rethinking assessment”.
While this work is due to be completed next year, initial findings point to a range of factors behind grade inflation such as more generous changes in assessment during Covid and use of open-book exams, based on records seen by The Irish Times.
Another likely factor has been a fear among universities of being “out of step” with competitors by awarding “too few firsts”.
Latest available data for the class of 2023 shows a significant variation in the proportion of first-class honours degrees awarded across higher education institutions.
Among the colleges who awarded the highest proportion of first-class honours degrees were IADT in Dún Laoghaire (41 per cent of students secured a first), followed by Technological University of the Shannon (26.3 per cent), UCC (25.4 per) and Royal College of Surgeons Ireland (23.6 per cent).
First-class honours were most difficult to come by at the National College of Ireland (15.9 per cent), followed by Mary Immaculate College in Limerick (17 per cent), Dundalk Institute of Technology (18.4 per cent) and Maynooth University (18.9 per cent).
Among the institutions where the proportion of first-class degrees was closer to the average were Trinity College Dublin (22.2 per cent), UCD (20.8 per cent), TU Dublin (22.2 per cent), UL (23 per cent), University of Galway (23.3 per cent).
There were also variations in the proportion of firsts by study area. In disciplines such as teaching and medicine, where gaining a higher education qualification is key to professional registration and career progression, the number of first-class honours tended to be lower.
Internal briefing records at the Department of Further and Higher Education state that it is often difficult to identify if higher grades are due to improved performance by graduates or changes in how students are assessed.
“The difficulty lies in determining how these changes relate to differences in graduate knowledge, skill or competence, as opposed to changes in approaches to the assessment of learning and algorithms for the classification of degrees,” records state.
Latest data, meanwhile, shows the student population in higher education is continuing to rise. It climbed to just over 260,000 in the 2023-2024 academic year, a 12 per cent rise since 2017-2018.
The gender gap has also continued to widen, with females now accounting for 55 per cent of students, up from 52.5 per cent in 2017-2018.
While total enrolments increased by 12 per cent over the last seven years, male enrolments increased by 5 per cent while the number of female enrolments increased by 18 per cent over the same period.
Last year, meanwhile, enrolment from students in Ireland climbed slightly while the sharpest increase was among non-Irish students. The United States, India and China were the biggest source of overseas students.
