Last gasp of the First?

The traditional classifications are past their sell-by date in the age of the modular degree, argue Kate Fullbrook and Geoffrey Channon

This is the time of year when academics in every institution of higher education across the UK have just met in examination boards; their task, to assign classified degrees to final-year undergraduates. Regulations are followed scrupulously; borderline decisions evoke agonised discussions; every attempt is made to be tough but fair. Both internal and external examiners put maximum effort into the generation of just and equitable results.

But for all the thought, attention, and care put into these boards, the results they generate are, if not suspect, then at least inappropriate. They are the product of an illogical hybrid examining system which still operates a classified honours system when the educational structures which made that system appropriate are all but defunct.

Persistence of tradition lies behind a system of degree classification which is no longer in tune with an education that increasingly generates its own final result. The classified degrees which examination boards verified, and the individual student performances which they ranked, tended to be single honours degrees, with few variations.

The climate was one in which only final classifications mattered: anything else (or anything other) constituted failure.

This system had many merits. It was suitable for the ranking of a small elite of highly similar students well-known to their teachers. Academics understood it. Employers understood it. Students understood it only too well: it produced generations haunted by their failure to attain a good first-class honours degree.

This system, with its virtues, vices, and spurious certainties, was always suspect in many ways, but it also served well for purposes of clarity and decisiveness in the ranking of educational achievement (and has often been mistaken as doing just as good a job in the ranking of quality of minds). But it is utterly inappropriate for the modular systems which now dominate more than 90 per cent of courses in England.

Modular systems are, by their nature, designed for the accumulation of results. Credits are built up over time and most modular systems feature continuous assessment as well as exams. The system marks a fundamental shift away from cramming to the constant production of good work. What is important is the record of achievement generated by each module.

Modularity also encourages patterns of learning which do not fit the three-year pattern of the traditional classified degree. Students may study full-time or part-time. They may leave and then return to their studies. They may pursue single-subject degrees or combined degrees of the widest cast. None of these patterns fits the traditional examining process, with its assumption of close knowledge of the students under scrutiny.

In a modular system it is entirely typical for results to be verified by a group of academics who have no personal knowledge of students beyond the marks generated by their modules. Their final degree may be awarded by a subject board to which few of their modules actually belong.

Modularity allows for a different view of the value of knowledge. Instead of seeing everything other than the classified degree as a relative failure, modular schemes regard every module passed as a small success. This has important implications for the updating and upgrading of knowledge by adults who wish to augment parts of their knowledge, but who do not need full-blown awards.

What matters in modular systems is the record of achievement over time. The results that matter are the marks generated by each module; the average generated by the modules passed; and the pattern of modules that verify the successful completion of the requirements for awards which meet agreed standards of competence and which cover a required range.

The awards themselves must be coherent and constructed through the process of aggregation of modules. Under this kind of scheme examining boards can know only the records of achievement of students, whose results are disaggregated, that is, spread over their modules.

"Aggregated" students, whose work is known to all examiners, are almost defunct and with them goes the rationale for examining boards' operation of discretion in judging final results. Respect for the rules of evidence to which higher education must always closely attend demands a move to examining systems suited to the new modular conditions.

The problem is, of course, that the full implications of modularity and its attendant suppleness for the delivery of real mass higher education is still hampered by vestiges of systems that were designed for anything but these ends. The classified degree system is one of these vestiges and the sooner it is consigned to the past for which it was appropriate, the bettern

Kate Fullbrook and Geoffrey Channon are the Associate Dean, Academic Affairs and the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of the West of England, Bristol.