VC's Voice

---

The end of the academic year is a good time to reflect on the role of prizes and awards in higher education. There is some ambiguity in our attitudes to student achievement. On the one hand, as an institution we devote a huge amount of time each year to the careful classification of honours degrees; but on the other hand, we have tended to downplay individual performance. In the last two years, however, at graduation ceremonies I have highlighted some of the most striking student achievements, and at the July graduation ceremonies this year we will note and celebrate the award of prizes for particular distinction.

Serious questions are being asked nationally about the degree classification system. Does it makes sense to spend so much effort on deciding which students get upper seconds and which lower seconds? An upper second may be the minimum requirement to be considered for many postgraduate programmes, but it is only the first stage of a selection process that uses much more detailed information, gleaned from references and transcripts, about the academic performance of the applicant. Newspaper league tables may treat the percentage of 'good' degrees that a university awards as some measure of its success, but employers are more sophisticated and look at degree class in relation to the university's entry standards and the curriculum followed by the student as well as the individual characteristics of the job applicant.

The problems of classifying the degrees of students who have studied abroad are perhaps the clearest indication of the inherent difficulties of the system. How does a 'trés bien' from Grenoble translate into a Sussex grade? What a fundamentally uninteresting question! The graduate who has been to Sussex and Grenoble should be able to display both achievements in their own terms.

The way forward might be to abandon the classification of degrees, and use transcripts, supplemented by information about relative performance, as a much richer source of information about academic achievement. Exceptional performance could still be recognised by a 'first class' or 'distinction' degree.

Sadly, any attempt these days to move to a more sensible system of classifying student achievement has to face the political reality that the abolition of degree classes would be treated by the Daily Mail as 'dumbing down', and that the government may be more sensitive to the prejudices of the Daily Mail than to rational argument. Change may be impossible before the next General Election.