Did yesterday mark a stepping stone in UK higher education or not? We will have to wait some time to find out. But I note that the press coverage today is generally very positive. So what happened yesterday? We need to go back a little to look at how we got there first.
On a gloomy day in the autumn of 2010 a small group of us assembled for a sandwich lunch in the room of the Vice-Provost of University College London to talk about how we could create greater discrimination in the degree awards we make to our students. We all observed that the proportions getting both first class honours and upper seconds were rising and - for example - the range of performances covered by an upper second was now very broad. Among the ideas that we thrashed around were dividing the upper seconds and doing the same with the firsts (an 'upper upper second', a 'lower upper second' and so on) but we quickly discarded these possibilities.
After looking at various alternatives we alighted upon the use of grade point averages as the way forward. This was something that had been considered before by a national group chaired by Bob Burgess, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leicester, but it had been felt to be too difficult to introduce nationally at the time. We, however, were prepared to contemplate going it alone with our own universities if necessary.
We met several times in the course of the next year, and when the Vice-Provost of UCL retired I took over as chair of the group. We had by then gone public with our thinking, and had recopgnised the need for background research and for some form of modelling. Ultimately we decided that we needed to broaden the number of universities involved in our discussions. The then universities minister, David Willetts, was interested in what we were doing, and supported the idea that the Higher Education Academy should take on running a project on the introduction of grade point averages. I handed over leadership of our small group to Bob Burgess to lead a national steering group.
And so we come to yesterday's launch of the national report at the headquarters of UUK - a couple of hundred metres from where representatives of seven universities had met four and a half years earlier. In many ways it's a simple report with a remarkably small number of recommendations:
1. A common scale for grade points across all UK universities.
2. The retention of university autonomy to decide local rules on things such as the inclusion or not of first year performance, weighting issues around later years of study, and so on.
3. Dual running of the current honours degree classification system with grade point systems for a number of years.
As with many wide-ranging projects, these recommendations represent a compromise but as a member of the group I have signed up to them. For myself, I would have preferred not to have dual running, but instead to move to recording all achievments on a grade point (rather than percentage) basis and to discard the degree classification. But I recognise pragmatic rasons for the recommendation.
I was on a panel at yesterday's event, chaired by David Willetts who has retained an interest in this topic even though he is no longer a minister, or even in parliament. The National Union of Students representative spoke strongly in favour of a move to the use of grade point averages, and so did the employers' representative. Someone from a university that has jumped the gun and already introduced dual running also spoke of their experience. And I ruminated on the extent to which the final national report matches the aspirations expressed over sandwiches and coffee in a UCL room back in the autumn of 2010.
But the time does seem ripe for change. There is a greater consensus now than there has been in the past that grade point averages have a lot more to offer than the current degree classification system. What we must now await is the political will to change what has become an entrenched (although arguably outmoded) way of dealing with assessment across the sector as a whole. On a day when the University of Oxford has announced the appointment of its first female Vice-Chancellor in over 800 years perhaps change is in the air.
On a gloomy day in the autumn of 2010 a small group of us assembled for a sandwich lunch in the room of the Vice-Provost of University College London to talk about how we could create greater discrimination in the degree awards we make to our students. We all observed that the proportions getting both first class honours and upper seconds were rising and - for example - the range of performances covered by an upper second was now very broad. Among the ideas that we thrashed around were dividing the upper seconds and doing the same with the firsts (an 'upper upper second', a 'lower upper second' and so on) but we quickly discarded these possibilities.
After looking at various alternatives we alighted upon the use of grade point averages as the way forward. This was something that had been considered before by a national group chaired by Bob Burgess, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leicester, but it had been felt to be too difficult to introduce nationally at the time. We, however, were prepared to contemplate going it alone with our own universities if necessary.
We met several times in the course of the next year, and when the Vice-Provost of UCL retired I took over as chair of the group. We had by then gone public with our thinking, and had recopgnised the need for background research and for some form of modelling. Ultimately we decided that we needed to broaden the number of universities involved in our discussions. The then universities minister, David Willetts, was interested in what we were doing, and supported the idea that the Higher Education Academy should take on running a project on the introduction of grade point averages. I handed over leadership of our small group to Bob Burgess to lead a national steering group.
And so we come to yesterday's launch of the national report at the headquarters of UUK - a couple of hundred metres from where representatives of seven universities had met four and a half years earlier. In many ways it's a simple report with a remarkably small number of recommendations:
1. A common scale for grade points across all UK universities.
2. The retention of university autonomy to decide local rules on things such as the inclusion or not of first year performance, weighting issues around later years of study, and so on.
3. Dual running of the current honours degree classification system with grade point systems for a number of years.
As with many wide-ranging projects, these recommendations represent a compromise but as a member of the group I have signed up to them. For myself, I would have preferred not to have dual running, but instead to move to recording all achievments on a grade point (rather than percentage) basis and to discard the degree classification. But I recognise pragmatic rasons for the recommendation.
I was on a panel at yesterday's event, chaired by David Willetts who has retained an interest in this topic even though he is no longer a minister, or even in parliament. The National Union of Students representative spoke strongly in favour of a move to the use of grade point averages, and so did the employers' representative. Someone from a university that has jumped the gun and already introduced dual running also spoke of their experience. And I ruminated on the extent to which the final national report matches the aspirations expressed over sandwiches and coffee in a UCL room back in the autumn of 2010.
But the time does seem ripe for change. There is a greater consensus now than there has been in the past that grade point averages have a lot more to offer than the current degree classification system. What we must now await is the political will to change what has become an entrenched (although arguably outmoded) way of dealing with assessment across the sector as a whole. On a day when the University of Oxford has announced the appointment of its first female Vice-Chancellor in over 800 years perhaps change is in the air.
