A Happy New Year to regular readers.

When I first sat in exam boards at the university the commonest degree class outcome was a Lower Second.  Thirds were more common than firsts, and I remember years when my department awarded no firsts at all.  Of course, at that time there were no real specified criteria for exam marking.  This meant that students didn't really know what we were looking for - but I suspect that as also true of a number of the staff.  Over the years I came to have the strong suspicion that those staff who I knew did not themselves have first class degrees were extremely loath to award first class marks to any student - perhaps because to do so would be to accept that the student had out-perofmed the staff member concerned.

Today I looked at the recent figures for degree classification from this university.  In 2010 18% of students received a First, and 57% a 2-1 or Upper Second.  Only 23% got a Lower Second, and 2% a Third. I have excluded from this analysis those degree schools (such as Medicine) where degrees are not classified.  The majority of stduents now get an Upper Second.

Colleagues in Student services have recently alerted me to trhe growing numbers of past students who are contacting them asking to be given mroe detail of their position within the Upper Second - either a percentage or a class position.  There is a paradox in as much as many students strive for an Upper Second as the be-all-and-end-all of their existence, yet an Upper Second is such a coarse label that employers and others (including us as universities when we are considering candidates for postgradute work) regrad it as a very weak discriminator.

For a year or so a small group of universities, of which Sheffield is one, has been discsusing the merits of moving to an alternative means of recognising students' academic performance. We looked at the European Credit Transfer System, but we have alighted upon Grade Point Averages as the way to go.  These are standard practice in the USA, Canada and a number of other coutnries, and have recently been adopted by China.  I have actually taken over as the chair of the group from a colleague in another university who has just changed roles.  Although our original group involved seven institutions, many others want to join us.  The tide is starting to flow in a particular direction.

The only real problem that I can foresee here in Sheffield is that the standard means of implementing a GPA is via letter grades (A+, A, A- etc) or via their exact equivalent in a short numerical scale.  A number of other universities are rapidly moving that way.  Those with longer memories will recall that Sheffield did so in the 1990s - well befroe anyone else - and then retreated from our 16 point scale a few years later.  Opposition was led by certain disciplines whose colleageus in other universities now seem to be among the leading protagonists for such short marking scales. 

The debates here will, I am sure, be very interesting ones.  I'd welcome comments from those who remember the battles over the relative merits of the 16 and 100 point scales.