Madam, – The recent furore over “grade inflation” has unfortunately been missing two very important points.
First, the fixation with the percentage of first class honours is placing the emphasis on the wrong end of the class. There are very good reasons, already well described in this paper by the heads of the Irish universities, to believe that better performance of students at the high end of the class is a natural consequence of better study practices and a far more rigorous approach to teaching and learning.
Of genuine concern, however, is the other end of the class, namely those struggling to pass. The large increase in the number of students attending third level has created a body of students who do not have the ability to complete an honours degree programme.
Hidden in the university pass rates is a significant level of condoned failure, whereby students failing one or more modules are allowed progress either through the compensation process or as a result of a possibly overly compassionate approach at examination board meetings. The latter would typically involve artificially raising marks to 40 per cent on the basis that it would not be in the student’s interest to have to repeat the module.
While this practice was usually confined to the early years of a degree programme, it is now an increasing feature of the final year. Thus, students with 2.2 degrees may actually have failed two or more final year papers and might have a long history of failure in the earlier years. The question of whether students like these should be embarking on honours degrees is one worth discussing.
The second broader point that the grade inflation discussion is missing is the question of whether the hurdles that we set for students are appropriate.
There is no doubt that, with the emphasis on good teaching and learning practice, the motivated student is provided with all the help and resources needed to score well in examinations and continuous assessment. However, it is not clear that students are developing core skills in writing, computation, problem solving, critical thinking, initiative, etc.
There is a real possibility that the increased emphasis on teaching and learning (where more is done for the student) is actually having the effect of creating graduates who are lacking basic skills and unable to think independently but have sufficient work ethic and intelligence to jump through some very well- defined hoops.
Perhaps there was some merit in the more laissez-faire approach to teaching that many of us experienced in the 1980s. – Yours, etc,