Frank Furedi

Assessment versus intellect

I was genuinely surprised to read that Professor Roderick Floud, president of Universities UK, has rejected the idea that degree inflation has become a fact of life on British campuses (Inflation by degrees, Education Guardian, March 18). I have not yet talked to a single academic who has lectured for more than 15 years who shares Floud's touching faith in the high standard of a British university degree. The fact is that degree inflation is continually driven by powerful institutional pressures that affect the day-to-day life of most academics.

The pressure to compete for student numbers has a profound impact on the way students are assessed and examined. It provides institutions with the incentive to please, placate and flatter.

The transformation of the student into a customer means that a good degree is increasingly seen as the outcome of a commercial transaction. As a result, institutions place strong pressure on academics to mark students "positively". Positive marking has become the hallmark of a customer-friendly university.

I have not come across a single instance where a department was criticised for marking too generously. However, numerous colleagues report that their departments have been warned for failing too many students or for not giving enough 2:1 or first-class degrees.

Outside auditing agencies reinforce this trend. In one instance, a colleague who served as a chief examiner for his department was reprimanded by a quality-assurance bureaucrat for not giving a first to any of the students. My colleague's protestations were dismissed with the words: "Don't tell me that none of your students are smart enough to get a first."

Grade inflation is also fuelled by the pressure to respond to an increasingly heterogeneous student population by altering the curriculum and methods of assessment. Many observers have noted that the shift from relying on final examinations to continuous assessment has contributed to the devaluation of a university degree. However, in principle there is nothing objectionable about using different forms of assessment to calculate final marks. The culprit is not continuous assessment but the fundamental redefinition of the meaning of assessment.

The problem is that the new forms of assessment promoted by the Institute of Learning and Teaching and other external bureaucratic agencies are invariably designed to bypass the need to test students' grasp of the intellectual content of the discipline.

Advocates of the ILT behaviourist type of pedagogy continually exhort academics to adopt new forms of assessments to meet the needs of a more diverse student body. At a recent quality assurance audit meeting, one senior academic was taken aback when his colleagues were advised to accept posters or collage-style assessment as an alternative to traditional essays. It was claimed that "patchwork essays" broaden access to education for those who are estranged from the experience of writing essays.

These days, just about anything can constitute an object of assessment: writing a CV, reflecting on the experience of working in a placement or an outline of an essay can all constitute a piece of assessment. The scornful dismissal of the traditional essay expresses a philistine contempt for the idea that it is the student's knowledge that ought to constitute the object of academic assessment.

Almost imperceptibly, the meaning of assessment has changed. Virtually any aspect of a student's experience now constitutes the object of a new assessment instrument. Peer, self and group assessment are referred to in the same breath as the more boring traditional ones. Assessment is not so much about testing and evaluating as about the management of students' university experience.

This new Taylorist approach towards assessment claims that assessment is at the heart of the learning process. This outwardly attractive notion elides the distinction between feedback and evaluation. Moreover, it demands that evaluation should be supportive and by implication non-judgmental.

The current version of continuous assessment lacks intellectual content because it is not primarily oriented towards the task of testing and evaluating the knowledge of a discipline. Its purpose is to monitor and manage students. That it also contributes to the determination of the grade of a student's degree is of secondary importance.

It is not the greater emphasis on assessment that is responsible for grade inflation. What has happened is that forms of assessment that lack intellectual merit are assuming an increasing role in the university sector. At best they attempt to assess different learning outcomes - bite-size chunks of education - but not knowledge. As a result, often what is graded has little in common with assessments that are consistent with academic standards.

Grade inflation is only a symptom of the problem. We are not simply assessing more leniently, but what we assess has little to do with the intellectual content of a university degree.

First published in the Guardian, 25 March 2003