Risk of ‘standardisation’ as ministers mull progression measures

Proposals to reform assessment and the way teaching quality is measured risk standardising university curricula and treating institutions like big schools, critics have warned.

Outlining its vision for the higher education sector in its skills White Paper last week, the UK government said it wants to review the external examining system used by the sector to decide students’ grades and develop a “Progress 8”-style measure to assess students’ learning gain.

Modelled on a metric currently used in secondary schools, this would track how much students progress in their time at university and provide “sharper incentives to improve quality and outcomes”, the White Paper says.

But Paul Ashwin, professor of higher education at the University of Lancaster, said, if the proposals were introduced, higher education would be “pushed towards common curricula for undergraduate degrees, which would be a huge change and a huge loss to the quality of higher education”.

The proposals are “based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the way in which higher education is different from school education”, Ashwin added, and seem more focused on “controlling processes, rather than about educating students”.

Universities currently rely on external examiners based at other institutions who operate as a quality check on assessments and ensure students of the same ability studying the same discipline receive broadly similar marks.

The system has been blamed however for recent grade inflation and for not ensuring students have the right skills when they graduate.

While the government did not say what should replace external examination, it committed to “consider the extent to which recent patterns of improving grades can be explained by an erosion of standards”. 

Dave Hitchcock, the course director for history at Canterbury Christ Church University, said external examiners were one of the only “meaningful internal quality structures focused on teaching provision which provide unbiased advice untethered to an institution’s priorities”.

“Externals are meant to be rigorously focused on the pure academic value and quality of a degree, and almost all of them have been sounding the alarm in their reports about declines in that quality, and in the available choice of provision and depth of education available to students.”

The proposals would only apply to English universities, and Eve Alcock, director of public affairs at the Quality Assurance Agency, said this could create a lack of consistency across the UK.

“It is vital for the UK sector’s reputation that academic standards are consistent across Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England…Pulling the English thread alone could risk unravelling the UK-wide tapestry, undermining the whole UK sector. 

“There may well be opportunities to strengthen aspects of the system like external examining, but that work must be led with a UK-wide lens to keep the tapestry intact, and maintain domestic and international trust in UK degrees.”

Steve Jones, professor of higher education at the University of Manchester, said the paper follows a “similar pattern” where universities are praised for being “world-leading” but “ties itself in knots on fixes for grade inflation and metrics for learning gain, instead of stepping aside and trusting academics to know what they’re doing”.

It is “disappointing” to see phrases including “the erosion of standards” in the paper, he said, adding that the government seems “unwilling to credit young people for becoming better learners – let alone academics for becoming better teachers”. 

“No one pretends the external examining system is flawless, but it’s probably the best mechanism we have,” he said.

Jones and Ashwin agreed that moving towards similar measurements of student progress seen in the school system would undermine the research-based nature of universities and institutional autonomy.

Successive governments have sought to introduce Progress 8-style measures for universities, Jones said, “but higher education doesn’t lend itself to that kind of algorithm”.

The measure provides a score indicating how well a pupil has progressed over their time in secondary school, compared with others who were at a similar attainment level at the start. 

Jones said there was a high risk of universities “gaming” such a system. “The idea of reducing our students’ learning to a single numeric value, calculated from one data point to another, should have been binned long ago.”

Meanwhile, Ashwin said when students in higher education are studying a variety of degrees with the curriculum set an institutional level, such progression metrics “don’t hold”. 

“There are so many concerns at the school level about students just learning to pass exams without coming into a personal relationship to knowledge, to want to extend that to higher education is bordering on madness,” Ashwin said.