A good old-fashioned 2.1 is better than a Higher Education Achievement Record

University examiners are an extremely conscientious crowd, and in my experience, degree marking is as fair as it could be, given human frailty (and far better that than a computer). All the same, I’ve often thought that we might be better off without the fixed degree class boundaries of first, 2.1 etc. As with all these linear classifications, it’s hard to feel entirely happy about lumping together the person who just missed a first with the one who just scraped a 2.1, and so on. So I’ve always had a certain sympathy with the idea of introducing a more nuanced record of a university degree.

Until I saw what was being piloted as the ‘Higher Education Achievement Record’ (Hear, for short -- of course), trumpeted in several papers this week (and deriving from last year’s Burgess report). It is apparently being test run in several UK universities right now.

Reading about it, I was sent rushing back into the arms of the old conventional nineteenth-century system  of ‘classes’, for all their faults. ‘Hear” has been developed by the kind of people who refer to what I call ‘universities’ as ‘the sector’ (that is, I guess, ‘HE sector). Its well-meaning, market-oriented approach to grading represents another nail in the coffin of academic and intellectual values in the universities.

Why do they want to change?

Well one reason, according to Bob Burgess in the Guardian (referring, proprietorially to the work of ‘my committee’), is that employers want more information than just a simple degree class (or projected one). Fine, but isn’t that what references are for? I think of it as part of my job to write references for my students, written specially for the particular post they have in mind. The best way of ensuring potential employers (‘stakeholders’ in Burgess-speak) get useful input from me is simple. First make sure the references I write are confidential; second make sure that employers take them up before short-listing the candidates  not after. There is no record of achievement that can be as helpful as two conscientious references.

Another is the idea that the final degree class doesn’t reflect the strengths and weaknesses shown by a student throughout the course. Thank heavens it doesn’t , I think. I am privileged to teach some of the very brightest students in the UK. I want them to develop their potential in all kinds of ways – so that, in whatever walk of life, they can go on to be stunning citizens (cliché but true). That often means taking apart their preconceptions. It means watching them take intellectual risks, make intellectual mistakes, even do badly before they do really well. The last think I want is every course they have done listed and graded. That’s a recipe for the US climate, where the students are knocking on your door complaining if you don’t give them an A. For there every mark counts. Some of my best student in Cambridge have got deltas on the way to alphas, and have learnt in the process about how not to be yes-women, when and how to take risks. Isn’t that what UK employers need?

The worst bit of this is the spectre of the extra-curricular activities that may get included on the report. The very last thing we need is every student rushing off to be president of a society to get it on their transcript. For a start, who is to say whether they have been a GOOD president or not? I’ve been through enough UCAS interviews (and yes, interviews ARE useful) where I’ve said to a potential student: “Oh I see you’re president of your school Tibetan society, what does that involve?”. “Well, we haven’t actually met yet,” comes the answer. But the more important point is that students learn to become good citizens (they learn to grow up, in other words) in many different ways. Some do it by beavering around running societies; others do it by lying on their beds for long hours listening to Bob Dylan and thinking. Noone, believe me, can predict which has the better outcome. But I do know that among the best contributors to the twenty-first century are some on-the-bed, Bob Dylan listeners.

We don’t need Hears, sectors, or Burgess reports. We need university teachers with the space to get to know their students and to write for them honestly, supportively and appropriately, whatever their degree result.

Comments

[Xjy]

@Lucy (wky): Thanks! You're a sweetheart. I hope your kids when they come are as the sands of the desert! ;-)

[Michael Bulley]

One of the questions, raised not so long ago in these columns, relates to what a good old-fashioned 2.1 means nowadays. In the current edition of the Times Higher Education, there is a leader which argues that, with the much greater number of students in British universities now, the average intelligence nationally of university students now must be lower than 30 years ago, for example. If that is so, there are difficult arguments for those who want to justify the higher proportion now of degree awards at the top levels. Maybe students learn better than they used to, but are they learning better enough to justify the statistics? Perhaps a good old-fashioned 2.1 isn't the same thing as a good new-fangled 2.1.

[Tony Francis]

In the US, corporate herd bonding occurs on golf courses and tennis courts. It is helpful to see and be seen at the local country club. The most useful class one can take in college is either golf or tennis or both. Take it from me. I eschewed both. It was a decision that got me to where I am today. (Not on the golf course or tennis court- hence not part of corporate America - but sadly [or happily] self employed.)

[Lucy (without kids. Yet)]

XJY: Now, that's the kind of Cambridge alum I can admire.

[Lucy (without kids. Yet)]

Yes, I agree, Mary. I'm so, so grateful I was able to follow a steep learning curve - not because that's a euphemism for 'being lazy for two years', either. And the idea of having to join societies or play sport in order to raise my grades makes my skin crawl: come on, how many people took Greek in order to avoid Games at school? Not just me, is it?

Separately (and more seriously), you do point out that the referees must be conscientious. I have had some incredibly careless references from Cambridge, including a bloke who didn't know if I'd got a first or a 2:1 in two of my papers (he downgraded me)and someone who missed the deadlines for three universities I was applying to for postgraduate work. Gee, thanks.

[JF`]

Agree that a GPA is not the way to go.

I like what you say about failing before succeeding. As a (proud-ish) member of the 8.i club, I came away with a 2.i, the same grade a far superior friend got after getting two firsts in Part 1, while I got two thirds. That was relatively unfair on her over the three years, but only because her grade was below what she deserved, not from what I did.

Furthermore remember the cambridge system doesn't work for everyone. I had a change in DoS during my GAP year and my new Dos and I just didn't get along. We both suffered as a result. A GPA system would have screwed me as I struggled for two years until Cambridge and I came to terms with each other, as did my DoS and I.

Besides, the most useful things I ever did were the extra-curricular stuff. All of which I use in my job now far more than my degree.

[Xjy]

"One set of exams" shows the extreme pressure at Cambridge students. However, the results are discussed thoroughly afterwards.
One student had his fingers broken by fascists pre-exam, and had to take the exams by dictation. Another in the sick bay with glandular fever.
I must have been an incredibly erratic student. One worthy said I was a waste of a place, but a supervisor said I could become an authority.
In one exam, I got excellent marks on the two questions I answered, and zero on the two I didn't. In one subject I was crap, in the others not too bad.
I listened to lots of Dylan and chilled on the Backs to Sergeant Pepper, and put up a placard in my window with the words "BE FREE!" And I read lots of books off the curriculum. My papers in Part 2 were almost unrelated, and thank the lord Finnish wasn't available! I had an impressionistic approach to the history of languages but did two papers involving this, one literary, the other philological. Plus the scientific General Linguistics.
Jesus.
2 of my languages I hadn't done at school.
I'd have been pulped anywhere using the proposed rules. Although at Stockholm I did OK despite the supermarket approach. But that was only because I'd been through Cambridge first. Method is all.
So, Cambridge was a bugger in some respects, and a paradise of liberal understanding in another.
What to do??
The only explanation I can think of is that I followed my interests and my gut. In retrospect quite ruthlessly and irrationally and bull at a gate.
I don't think many other places than Cambridge could have digested me. Pig-headed, irreverent, lurching, off-message. Socially a rough diamond they never managed to polish.

And yet...

[Ellid]

GPAs tell readers nothing except that a student did well in his or her classes. American employers ignore them except in certain very specialized cases. Why do UK employers need them?

[Stefan]

Mary, I got a 2:i in 2007. Sadly, I did not narrowly miss out on a First (average of 67), but certainly did not just scrape through. So, how to save the problem?

One of the first things I did after graduating was order a bunch of copies of an official transcript from the university admin people, to be photocopied and sent off to whomever requires them. If someone specifies that they want a photocopy of my certificate, they get a transcript as well.

No matter what I am applying for, my CV always has, in italics, "Full breakdown available on request" under my degree result - the same text that's under the "GCSEs: xA*s and yBs". More often than not, I list the marks for my five Part II papers.

It really is not difficult!

(re: extra-curricular activities. I think Cambridge should close any student society that advertises itself by putting "IT WILL LOOK GOOD ON YOUR CV" anywhere whatsoever on their promotional material!)

[Michelle]

There is insufficient information in the classification system to be useful, but reference letters are not the solution. In the states references letters have become almost useless, as everyone comes out sounding glowing. Far better is the performance record known as the grade point average (GPA) which averages student performance over the entire course, accompanied by an individual transcript showing performance in each subject. In that way you can pick out the difference between a middling student and a brilliant student who had one bad year, or who struggled with one aspect of a subject. It is not flawless or perfect, but in general I have found no better metric of overall academic performance here or in the states. I have also seen no worse metric than the result of a single set of exams in determining someone's suitability for either a job or further postgrad studies.

[John]

"But I do know that among the best contributors to the twenty-first century are some on-the-bed, Bob Dylan listeners."

Hear, hear! I finally have an advocate.

All this seems to take from employers the responsibility--or the benefit--of making their own nuanced, idiosyncratic judgments on candidates for hire. If we compartmentalize what we perceive as every aspect of the student (sick discussions of manufacturing the "ideal student" aside), we turn the student into a series of ticked boxes. What, then, is the purpose of an interview?

[Richard Baron]

Mary, I entirely agree. The need to get all the boxes ticked, both curricular and extra-curricular, will lead to the production of model citizens who will fit into, not break, the mould. Of course that is what employers mostly want. A large organization needs a few people who will challenge the system and offer creative ideas for change, but only a few.

My experience of recruitment is that degree subject and class are only useful for a rough short-listing, and given that they have that very limited role, there is no point in replacing them with anything more complicated. The only good way to find the best people for a job is to get the candidates who pass the first short-listing stage to do some part of that job - give a lecture, fix a motor car, or whatever - and see how they get on.

I hope that a few robust vice-chancellors will point out that just as it is not the job of universities to do social engineering, it is not their job to serve employers. Can we club together to send copies of Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy and John Henry Newman's The Idea of a University (specifically part 1, discourse 5) to a few Government ministers?

[Jane]

A very, very interesting post. I agree with everything you say, except on the subject of references. Your argument depends on other referees being as conscientious as you are, which many most definitely are not. And heaven forfend any more legislation and red-tape on any aspect of employment law.

Students are able to obtain, post-graduation, a detailed breakdown of their final exam results, which they could then show an employer.

Apart from that, employers must expect to show some nuance and subtlety in their selection process.

I would very much like to know some more about the liers-in-bed who are making a contribution to the 21st century.

[Richard]

One of the things which is irritating about the proposal is the implication that the job of the university is to produce a short summary which somehow allows the employer to get to know the candidate: if they want to know about a graduate's extra-curricular interests, why don't they ask them for themselves? Talking to a candidate about it (or only reading their own CV) might be considerably more useful than reading a transcript from the university...

Something which might be more useful to employers and a more reasonable request to make of universities would be a description of what kind of thing a given degree result was based on: an employer could perfectly reasonably feel she didn't understand what a degree in Tibetan Studies actually involved, and could find it useful to have an explanation that it was partly based on intense language acquisition, and partly on literature and cultural history (as it might be). Academics often write short accounts of "aims and objectives" when proposing new courses ("Students will study x, y and z... At the end of the course, they should be able to disply the following skills and areas of knowledge..."); short descriptions like these could perhaps be combined into a transcript? That way the potential employer can see "this candidate has excelled in a course with lots of work on close reading of complex texts" or "this candidate should be great at synthesising lots of diverse data into essay-type accounts"?

Just a thought... Could have advantages for students on the courses that employers are likely not to understand: I think that they worry about this sometimes. But of course as Mary says it's no replacement for good references.

All best,
Richard

[Tony Francis]

The question always comes up: how much is a college degree worth? The US census bureau indicates the average college graduate earned (in 2004) $51,000 while the high school graduate earned $28,000.
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/education/007660.html

The difference over 40 working years is $920,000. But it is only $820,000 if the years lost working while in school are factored in. If one leaves school with a debt of $100,000 or more, the price of a degree may not be worth the cost. Clearly, many degrees aren't worth the paper they are written on. On the other hand, many companies will promote someone to a management position simply because they have a degree, even if it is in History or English. The old joke: If you can stay in college for four years and get a degree, you must have something of worth going for you. For a lot of kids, a good tech or manual arts degree is probably worth more. Two years and hire out at $20 or $30 an hour, if you can find the work.

A guy from Michigan told me that a person who knew someone in the union could get hired on at a GM plant at age 18. If you could stand working on the line, you could retire at 43 after 25 years at 70% of your base salary, plus benefits. Of course, this is why US car companies are going broke, unions are job killers and all the jobs are going to Mexico and China. It is even cheaper to built cars in Canada, with all their rules than the US.

Of course, the value of a good liberal arts education can't be minimized. That comes from a person who has been the victim... no wait, the beneficiary of many schools. After awhile, you can learn to teach yourself.