Princeton curbing grade inflation

Princeton has been tackling grade inflation

According to a news article from the University the proportion of A grades awarded has fallen from 47.9% in 2002-03 to 39.7% in 2008-09 following the introduction of a new grading policy:

The policy, adopted by the faculty in April 2004 to curb grade inflation across the University, sets an institution-wide expectation for the percentage of grades in the A range and provides clear guidelines on the meaning of letter grades. Grades have been coming down steadily since the policy was established.

“These results confirm once again that with clear intent and concerted effort, a university faculty can bring down the inflated grades that — left uncontrolled — devalue the educational achievements of American college students,” the committee’s statement said. “The Princeton faculty continues to make successful progress in its determined effort to restore educational content and meaning to the letter grades earned by the highest-achieving students in the United States.”

Interesting development this and shows what can be achieved with what sounds like a sensible and measured approach to tackling grade inflation.

‘Radical change’ is needed to reassure public on standards says THE

Follow up to earlier post on this topic.

According to Times Higher Education: “‘Radical change’ is needed to reassure public on standards”.

External examiners would be interviewed by inspection teams and universities would give a clear indication of the number of hours they expect students to study under plans to boost public confidence in the quality of higher education. A new “public-facing” role for the Quality Assurance Agency and an independent channel for external examiners to report concerns are also among the wide-ranging proposals published in a report to the Higher Education Funding Council for England on 1 October.

Hefce’s Teaching, Quality and the Student Experience sub-committee, chaired by Colin Riordan, vice-chancellor of the University of Essex, was set up to investigate concerns about standards raised last year. Its key message is that while there is “no systemic failure” in the sector, allegations of poor quality pose a serious risk to its reputation, and “radical change” is required in the way that information about quality and standards is communicated.

It is important to stress that the ‘radical change’ here relates to the communication of information, not to the wider issues about the assurance of standards and quality (and to note that the word ‘radical’ appears only once in the report, in the foreword). Articulating arrangements for the assurance of academic standards in a clear and accessible way is notoriously difficult – as the IUSS select committee discovered when talking to the VCs from Oxford and Oxford Brookes Universities.

External Examiner review (and quality and standards)

Universities UK is to undertake a review of external examining

A press release from Universities UK gives some background to the recently announced review of external examiners:

In his keynote speech at the Universities UK Annual Conference, President Professor Steve Smith announced that UUK, together with GuildHE and in collaboration with agencies such as the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) and the Higher Education Academy (HEA), would lead a UK-wide review of external examiner arrangements. This review will seek to ensure that the system remains robust, recommending any improvements
which would continue to support the comparability of academic standards and meet future challenges.

The Group, which will be chaired by a Vice-Chancellor (to be announced) and include representatives from across the sector, will address various issues, including:

• The need to develop Terms of Reference for the role, to support consistency
• Reinforcing the specific role of external examiners in ensuring appropriate and comparable standards
• Analysing the level of support given by institutions to external examining, both financial and professional
• Current and future challenges and changing practice (such as modularisation) and their implications for external examining
• Comparing the UK system with international practice

After 12 months, the Group will produce a report, highlighting the immediate short-term improvements, as well as longer term challenges and how these should be addressed.

Meanwhile, HEFCE has just announced the outcome of a study on quality and standards which has been picked up by the BBC. Its recommendations include:

• a review is needed of publicly available information provided by higher education institutions (HEIs) to meet the needs of students, parents, advisers and professionals
• a complete review of the external examiner system should be undertaken
• the degree classification system should be improved so that it better reflects student achievement.

Looks like there will be a bit more work then beyond external examiners but these do not seem to be hugely challenging tasks (indeed they have been on the agenda for some time) and reflect the conclusions of the HEFCE report that “There is no systemic failure in quality and standards in English higher education (HE), but there are issues needing to be addressed”.

This UUK external examiner review, supported by the HEFCE study, represents a speedy response to the recent (truly dreadful) report of the IUSS Select Committee. The IUSS report recommends the implementation of one of the 1997 Dearing recommendations, rejected at the time, on the creation of a national system of external examiners. It is to be hoped that the UUK review arrives at something sensible. (For anyone with a longish memory on these things it feels a bit like 1994-95 again and the Graduate Standards Programme and its reviews of external examining.)

How real is the concern over degree standards?

Guardian story: Take concern over degree standards seriously, universities warned

Whilst MPs will always find ways to give VCs and universities a hard time, they can rarely be accused of getting too close to the serious issues. But where is the evidence for this huge public concern about degree standards? And are the responses the right way forward in the context of what is inevitably going to be a reduction in public funding for universities?

Universities must take public concern over degree standards seriously if they want to make the case for more investment by the taxpayer, the new head of the higher education funding body warned yesterday. Speaking on his first day in the job, Sir Alan Langlands, the former chief executive of the NHS, took vice-chancellors to task when they complained about being “roasted” by MPs during an inquiry into qualifications at British universities and the quality of the student experience.

“Sometimes select committees catch the public mood. There is real public interest which needs to be addressed. If there is some scepticism we have to be able to take that head on and deal with it,” said Langlands, chief executive of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce).

But is there really a big public concern about standards? There just doesn’t seem to be much evidence to support the notion that there is widespread scepticism about degrees.

Prof Rick Trainor, vice-chancellor of King’s College London and president of Universities UK, said they had been given a roasting by the committee and that universities and Hefce should act together against a “sustained campaign of scepticism” by MPs and others.

Baroness Blackstone, vice-chancellor of Greenwich, said there had been some grade inflation in numbers of firsts and 2:1 degrees due to league tables and the sooner universities moved away from this crude assessment the better.

Whilst there is a debate to be had about the replacement of degree classification (and attempts are still being made to promote the alternatives), accepting the proposition that the proportion of good degrees has risen because of league table driven grade inflation doesn’t seem to be a helpful starting point in countering the sceptics.

Prof Geoff Crossick, warden of Goldsmiths London, said the maintenance of standards was fragile because of lack of resources. “Quality will be under threat in coming years and we need to be able to resist reductions in funding,” he said.

But funding has gone up, including as a result of variable fees, and to argue that there is fragility in standards maintenance and that quality is threatened does seem somewhat disingenuous in an economic climate where there is only one direction we can expect public funding for universities to be heading. It is far from clear how this is going to be resisted by the sector given the funding gains and the pay increases in recent years.

On the prospects of future funding, Langlands warned: “I have been involved in government spending negotiations for 15 years and I have known a less propitious time for arguing for public investment.”

(This must be a misquote, surely.) Not propitious times at all. And, whilst there might not be a big public debate about degrees at the moment, linking funding demands to the maintenance of standards and quality may end up bringing one about. That really wouldn’t be terribly helpful.

Degree awarding powers for private company

Degree awarding powers for BPP College

According to their website:

BPP College of Professional Studies (“BPP College”) today announced that the Privy Council has approved the grant of degree awarding powers to BPP College (which comprises BPP Law School and BPP Business School). BPP College is owned by BPP Holdings plc, a publicly quoted company on the London Stock Exchange. The grant of degree awarding powers makes BPP College the first private sector company to be a degree awarding entity in the United Kingdom.

The decision by the Privy Council follows a very full and careful audit and review by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (“QAA”) of BPP College’s organisation, governance and management as well as close scrutiny of BPP College’s quality assurance mechanisms, academic standards and its support systems for students and staff.

The report of the review is not published under the current procedures so guess we will have to wait for the first audit to learn more.

Further coverage offered by BBC.

So, the question for all other institutions is – should we be worried?

Another winning QA idea: international standardisation

From the Chronicle

Quest for International Measures of Higher-Education Learning Results Raises Concerns
By AISHA LABI

A fledgling international effort to develop comparable assessment standards for measuring how much students are learning at higher-education institutions throughout the world is provoking concern from several quarters, even though the project is still in its preliminary stages.

The project is being led by the OECD and it seems that at a meeting of education ministers they were a bit short of discussion topics over dinner:

the apparent dearth of available data on student-learning outcomes prompted discussion about how to fill that void. “It became evident that there are a lot of measurements about research outcomes at institutions of higher education, but what about the learning outcomes?” said Barbara Ischinger, director for education at the organization, which is known as the OECD.

However:

“The notion of measuring students’ achievement within the United States has been very controversial,” said Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education. “The notion of developing a mechanism to do it across the world seems orders of magnitude more controversial.”

(which is putting it mildly)

The OECD has held two meetings of about a dozen experts this year, with a third scheduled for next month in Seoul, South Korea. “We’ve started to exchange information and views about existing assessment programs in some countries,” said Ms. Ischinger. “It is now shaping up more into a direction of what could be done in terms of assessing generic-skills competencies, such as analytical reasoning, critical thinking, and also discipline-related competencies — for instance, in the natural sciences and engineering.”

But this is hard enough to achieve within disciplines, it’s pretty challenging at the institutional level and next to impossible in any meaningful way in a national context. It is difficult to imagine quite how generic these things are going to be when articulated in a (literally) universal way.

No grounds for concern though, it will all be up to us to decide:

According to summaries of the minutes of the first two meetings, the OECD has decided to focus its approach, at least initially, on voluntary participation at the institutional level.