Report to the University of York Teaching Committee, March 1996.

1.1. When national higher education quality assurance mechanisms were set up, the prevailing philosophy was one of quality, where quality meant fitness for purpose. Two of the great strengths of the HE system in the UK were seen to be its diversity, and the academic autonomy of individual institutions. Individual institutions were responsible for setting their own missions and objectives in the light of their historical strengths, location, and other factors; and the nation as a whole benefited from a wide range of types of institution catering for different needs. The abolition of the binary divide reinforced the ideal of a highly diverse sector with broad parity of status and esteem. External audits (by the HEQC) and assessments (by the HEFCE) were not supposed to judge institutions by reference to absolute standards, but to evaluate their success in ensuring quality relative to their self-set objectives. Individual audit and assessment teams may not always have fully adhered to this philosophy in practice; but this was nevertheless the official philosophy.

1.2. In 1994, John Patten, the then Minister for Education, set the cat among the pigeons by calling for greater attention to be paid to ‘broad comparability’ of standards, and his successor has confirmed the same line. The main reasons were the following:

• The quality approach had the fundamental weakness that it provided no means for judging the appropriateness of the institutional missions and objectives by reference to which quality was assessed.

• Institutions themselves were still concerned to maintain standards across the sector. The principal mechanism for ensuring the maintenance of standards was the external examiner system; but its efficacy had been called into doubt.

• There were growing complaints from employers that graduates often lacked the expertise, skills and other characteristics they had traditionally expected of them.

• Despite a general broadening of entry standards and types of qualification, and a decline in the unit of teaching resource, more students were gaining upper-second and first-class degrees, and fewer were being failed. Unless there had been an unprecedented increase in the efficiency and efficacy of teaching, the obvious conclusion was that standards had been lowered for cosmetic purposes.

• It was unclear that standards of modular programmes or new subjects taught for the first time at degree level were comparable to those of traditional non-modular programmes in well-established subjects.

• International doubts about the value of a UK degree endangered our position as a net exporter of higher education, and the prospects of our graduates in the global job market. In particular there had been scandals about the quality assurance of UK qualifications franchised overseas.

1.3. The Government maintained the position that standards were the responsibility of the HE sector itself. However, the sector has always been aware that its retention of autonomy is conditional upon its satisfying its paymasters that adequate quality assurance mechanisms are in place, and that there is no need for direct external control. The HEQC responded rapidly by revising its quality audit procedures to include an item on standards. Nevertheless, this was still couched in the language of quality rather than of absolute standards, as evidenced by the following extracts from Notes for the Guidance of Auditors, March 1995, §16:

1.4. Clearly this would not be sufficient to allay Government worries, and the HEQC simultaneously set up its Graduate Standards Programme. An interim report was published in December 1995, and one of its main conclusions was that:

2.1. The HEQC is wholly owned by CVCP/SCOP, and it has always maintained that it is the servant, not the master of the HE sector, and that its role is to articulate and implement a sector-wide consensus. It has therefore instituted a series of regional consultative seminars, in order to elicit responses to a more recent ‘paper to stimulate discussion’, entitled What are Graduates? Clarifying the Attributes of ‘Graduateness’. The main points in the paper are as follows:

2.2. A broad distinction can be made between three kinds of graduate achievement:

• Field-specific: the possession of a body of knowledge and other qualities particular to the field (or fields) of studies;

• Shared: the possession of certain more general attributes that might be common to graduates from families of degrees;

• Generic: the possession of yet more general attributes, which might be common to all — or most — graduates.

The ‘graduateness’ project is concerned only to identify shared and generic attributes, and to explore how possession of them might be assessed. It is still an open question whether there are in fact any generic attributes.

2.3. The project is not concerned with degrees in so far as they are a professional qualification, but with the essential attributes of a graduate as such, or ‘fitness for award’.

2.4. The primary objective is to establish a threshold standard for all degrees, regardless of field or institution (p.6: "the notion of ‘graduateness’ must, by definition, denote the threshold expectations for the award of a degree of any kind"). Although any attributes may be manifested in different ways in different fields, the project should assist course designers to articulate explicitly the expectations they have of a graduate, and to build on them the articulation of subject-specific standards.

2.5. Articulating the threshold expectations for a bachelor’s degree also involves the question of level — i.e., distinguishing the level of a bachelor’s degree from that of secondary education, further education, and sub-degree qualifications on the one hand, and postgraduate diplomas and masterships on the other hand. Similarly, there is the question of the difference between an Honours, and an ordinary, unclassified, or pass degree.

2.6. The project has avoided starting out from lists of ‘core skills’, ‘key skills’, or ‘personal transferable skills’, for the following reasons:

• These terms have originated largely from outside HE as ways of expressing the needs of employers or of society more generally. The purpose of the project is to articulate what the academic community expects of a graduate before then seeking to match this against other expectations.

• The attributes of a graduate may consist of qualities other than skills — for example, knowledge, understanding, dispositions, attitudes, and values.

• Even if there is a skill element, it may not be reducible to a specifiable set of sub-skills.

• It is highly questionable whether generic skills are in fact transferable.

2.7. It is important to distinguish the attributes of graduateness from ancillary qualities which would be expected of a graduate, but which it has not previously been regarded as the responsibility of higher education to teach (for example, literacy, numeracy, computeracy, and general knowledge). Absence of such qualities will impede the exercise of the higher-level qualities of graduateness, and must be remedied; but they are not among the qualities which a graduate may be expected to have acquired primarily through the experience of degree-level study.

2.8. Once any list of the attributes of graduateness has been agreed, there are still problems over how their possession is to be assessed, and how far most or all of them should be a necessary condition for graduation.

3.1.1. The only empirical evidence adduced that academic standards have declined is that more students are gaining better classes of degree. However, it is equally evidence that standards have risen. The claim that standards have declined is not even meaningful unless it can be shown that students are getting higher grades than they used to on the same tests. But the disciplines taught at university, and expectations on students, have changed so much that long-term comparisons are no longer possible. Many of these changes have been the direct result of the Government’s own encouragement to lay greater stress on skills and relevance (e.g. the Enterprise in Higher Education initiative). Any attempt to ossify standards as they are at present, or as they are imagined to have been in the past, will inhibit change, and conflict with the aim that UK higher education should retain its place at the forefront of academic advance.

3.1.2. There is a quite separate, a priori argument. Intellectual ability is genetically determined, and normally distributed over the population. Only the most able are capable of higher education. If there is a rise in the number of students, more will be admitted from lower in the ability range. Consequently, more students should fail if standards remain constant. However, the premises are highly debatable, and incompatible with the Government’s policy of moving from an elite to a mass higher education system. The only way of determining the limits of higher educability is by putting them to the test — and even then they may be set more by the nature of pre-university education or cultural factors rather than by genetics.

3.1.3. The Government is justifiably concerned at the cost of moving from an elite to a mass higher education system, particularly since the level of state support per student has been high by international standards. The Government has rapidly driven down the unit of resource, and it continues to maintain the fiction that there is no causal connection between funding and quality. The profession has aided the Government’s case by awarding more students better degrees at the same time as funding has declined. The Government’s sudden concern for standards is hardly consistent with its denial of any connection between funding and quality, and it may in fact be a red herring. What the Government is really concerned about is value for money, on its somewhat restricted conception of value. It may even believe that there is no point in having a publicly funded higher education system at all, if the costs outweigh the benefits. It is far from evident that the Government is concerned that higher education has deteriorated from the excellence of the past. The last thing it wants is a return to the values and standards of the ‘60s, since in those days higher education was more expensive, and less relevant to the world of work. The question of threshold standards is at best peripheral to the primary task of ensuring that publicly funded higher education is seen to represent good value for money.

3.1.4. Another source of concern is again a consequence of the change from an elite to a mass system. Some of the traditional properties of graduateness have more to do with the experience of being a student than with the education received — for example, leaving home and taking responsibility for one’s life; a sense of differentness from ordinary people (gown rather than town); and the acquisition or reinforcement of a professional and middle-class lifestyle and values. But if there is nostalgia for an outmoded stereotype of the graduate, it should be confronted directly by stressing the role of higher education in bringing about a more classless society. This is no mean challenge, since there are vested interests at stake both within and outside higher education, and there is a tension between the expensive ideal of the residential campus, and that of a learning centre serving the whole community.

3.1.5. Similarly, employers have traditionally used different types of qualification as a means of selecting candidates from different ability ranges. For example, the Civil Service used to select administrators from graduates, executive officers from those with A-levels, and clerical staff from those with O-levels. With the growth and diversification of higher education, a graduate is no longer one of an elite 5% or 10% of the population. Employers must therefore either raise their requirements (e.g. to an upper-second honours degree or a postgraduate qualification), or abandon the idea that there is a small, generally able elite which can be easily identified by a qualification. There is quite widespread cynicism among employers as to the value-added of a degree, perhaps encouraged by a historic tendency for universities to be stricter about entry standards than about exit standards. For some employers, a degree merely postpones the age at which they take in recruits who would previously have been selected at the age of 18. However, it is a fact of life that graduate recruitment has to be a more complex task in a mass system. Employers need help in selecting graduates suited to their requirements, not a simplistic list of threshold standards common to all graduates.

3.1.6. As for the international perception of the value of a UK degree, it is difficult to draw any general conclusions. Exchange students are generally impressed by the level of individual attention, and the quality of the infrastructure and support services. These are endangered more by reductions in funding than by the niceties of assessment standards. Bureaucrats, especially in the EU, tend to calibrate qualifications in terms of the number of years of study and the number of hours spent in class. The three-year degree is already anomalously short, and a two-year degree would not be taken seriously, whatever its actual standards.

3.2.1. The HEQC must be aware that an approach based on the assurance of standards cuts across one based on the assurance of quality. The Council has rapidly brought about major improvements in quality assurance throughout higher education, and without having to impose any sanctions. It should build on its success, and not allow itself to be deflected by an irrelevant and inoperable concept of standards. The concept of quality centres on the necessity for every organisation in a diverse and changing sector to make its objectives explicit, and to ensure that it delivers those objectives. This is crucial for the justification of higher education, and for employers and others to know what to expect of graduates. If an organisation has inappropriate objectives, its graduates will not get jobs, and it will have difficulty recruiting students. The concept of standards, on the other hand, implies uniformity, stasis, and the derogation of responsibility away from the point of delivery.

3.2.2. This is no doubt why the HEQC, publicly at least, has decided to focus its attention on the very small number of candidates around the pass/fail borderline. Numbers are so small, that the sector can accept a harmonisation of threshold standards without its seeming to threaten the diversity of provision for the large majority of students. There is much comforting talk of the commitment to diversity; of how diversity is not threatened by external scrutiny; of how standards must remain the responsibility of individual institutions; of how academic values are prior to the requirements of employers; and of the need to ‘police’ merely ‘the outer limits of diversity’. But precisely because the numbers are so small, the exercise is a waste of time unless it is the thin edge of a wedge — whether to create a new binary divide (as John Stoddart asked: ‘Do the Russell Group want to be comparable with other universities?), or to force all universities into a much narrower and more centrally controlled framework of standards at all levels. The HEQC should be orchestrating a debate on the real issues facing the sector, rather than generating a false sense of security.

3.2.3. This is not the only reason why it is dangerous to concentrate on threshold standards. As members of the HEQC have themselves pointed out, academics tend to regard the 2.i/2.ii borderline as the real point of discrimination between those who have, and those who have not profited from higher education. When pressed to set objectives for a programme or module, many academics have a genuine difficulty in defining performance criteria below a 2.i. in anything other than negative terms, and would be embarrassed to articulate the minimum criteria for a pass as any sort of an achievement. We are caught in the dilemma that the reputation of UK higher education would be damaged either by publicising actual threshold standards for a degree, or by failing half our students at the end of three years of study. The concept of a common threshold standard may serve to highlight the problem, but it does not solve it. Nor does it mean that the problem can only be solved by setting common standards at higher levels. The quality approach is the most appropriate for selecting students who can most profit from a particular programme of study, and for setting performance standards for each level of achievement of its specific objectives.

3.2.4. Standards are so intimately connected with levels, that it is often difficult (and perhaps pointless) to keep them apart. For example, a good performance at level 2 of a degree may be indistinguishable from a less good performance at level 3. Part of the diversity of higher education is that some subjects are intrinsically more progressive than others (for example, a foreign language degree is more progressive than, say, English literature, where it may not matter whether a particular module is taken at level 2 or level 3). Modularisation has helped institutions to be more explicit about levels in terms of pre-requisites; but the level of a module may have more to do with the way a programme has been structured than with intrinsic difficulty — a module will have been designed on the assumption that the students already have certain knowledge and skills taught in another module; but it could have been the other way round. Generally, modularisation enables the design of broader and more cumulative programmes of study. The Government’s worry seems to be that standards must be lower, since students will not have had the experience of pursuing one subject to any depth. But again, the solution is not to go down the road of setting benchmark standards, but to articulate the objectives and quality criteria of each programme — even if the programme is unique to an individual student, as in Independent Study. We should not allow ourselves to be dominated by the geographical and agricultural metaphors of ‘area’, ‘field’, and ‘depth’. Subjects are not separated from each other by hedges, but have many areas of overlap; they are not cognate because they have a common border on the map of knowledge; new subjects are not less specialised because they lack a unified territory on a historically determined map; and it is not necessarily better to dig deep over a small area than to plough a wider field to an appropriate depth.

3.2.5. Another Government worry is that higher education used to be at a ‘higher’ level because it built on the A-level standard achieved by the end of secondary education. Now that more and more students are entering without A-levels, it might be that much of higher education is at no higher a level than secondary education. However, this overlooks the fact that only some traditional subjects build on what has been learned at A-level, and even then much A-level work has to be repeated because of the diversity of A-level syllabuses. Other subjects have always been taught ab initio in UK universities simply because they are not generally taught in UK schools, even if they are taught in schools elsewhere in the world (for example, certain foreign languages, and philosophy). It may be that the experience of learning a new subject at university is different from that of learning it at a secondary or even a primary school. It may also be that there are certain subjects which can only be tackled properly by people of a certain age, maturity and experience. Nevertheless, it remains the case that much of what is studied post-18 could have been studied at an earlier age if the school curriculum had been different. No-one is suggesting that non-school subjects should not be taught at university, or that they should be taken out of the higher education sector on the grounds that they are not really higher education. Rather we should conclude that it never made much sense to equate the ‘higher’ of higher education with a higher level of study, and hence reject the suggestion that there should be common entry and exit standards. We have been trapped by a metaphor and a pun, which could be simply avoided by dropping the term ‘higher education’, and referring instead to ‘post-18 education’, or ‘the university system’. Not everything can be taught at school, and it is a perfectly proper function of post-18 education to offer a much broader range of subjects. But the consequence is that there cannot be common entry or exit standards across subjects, and we should not pretend otherwise.

3.2.6. Just as subjects vary in the extent to which they build on specialised A-levels, so do institutions vary in their dependence on A-levels as an entry qualification, and in their emphasis on developing students’ knowledge and skills within traditional subject boundaries. This is an inevitable consequence of the shift from an elite to a mass system. Any attempt to impose common standards could be damaging both to the more traditional universities (if threshold standards are defined in terms of relevance to employment), and to those at the forefront of change (if standards are more closely linked to entry qualifications). Perhaps this is what is meant by ‘policing the outer limits of diversity’, since diversity has limits at both ends.

3.3.1. The Graduateness Project is based on an inappropriate theory of definition.

3.3.2. The authors of the paper on graduateness normally avoid talking in terms of defining graduateness. It is implied, though not actually stated, that there is a perfectly good definition of graduateness, namely possession of a degree. This is not as trivial a definition as it may seem, since possession of a degree means that the graduate has had a more or less close and long-term association with an institution accredited by the authority of the State, and has been awarded a special life-long status through due process and with proper ceremony. The self-confidence and respect associated with this special status may be the only valuable quality which is common and exclusive to all graduates. Naturally the value of this quality has changed over time, since it is fast becoming the sine qua non of self-esteem, rather than something special (one might compare the changed value of literacy as it became more widespread).

3.3.3. Instead, the authors talk of identifying the attributes possessed by graduates. Technically, the term for this in traditional logic is property. An attribute is a defining characteristic of a class (in this case, possession of a degree), whereas a property is a non-defining characteristic which is common and exclusive to members of the class. In practice the distinction is not important here, since both defining characteristics and non-defining properties are supposed to be common and exclusive. The Project is to list such properties, and they might just as well be taken as a definition of graduateness.

3.3.4. A further distinction needs to be made between a descriptive and a prescriptive definition. The former lists the properties which are in fact common and exclusive to all graduates; the latter lists the properties which all graduates ought to possess. The Project is couched in the language of description, but there is a barely concealed threat that it will become prescriptive — that institutions will be told not to award degrees to candidates unless they possess a specified set of threshold properties.

3.3.5. Whether the Project is descriptive or prescriptive, the authors themselves recognise that it is problematic — that there may be no properties common to all graduates, but only to sub-groups (e.g. all BScs or all BAs); that there may be ‘ancillary qualities’ which are common to all graduates but not definitive of graduateness; that properties might be instantiated in different ways in different disciplines, making comparisons difficult; and that it may not be realistic to expect all properties of all graduates. I would claim that the Project is not merely difficult, but fundamentally flawed in conception, since it presupposes an essentialist theory of class membership which is wholly inappropriate for a rich and diverse concept such as that of graduateness.

3.3.6. Essentialism is wrong because the majority of concepts do not fit the Aristotelian model of essences and properties. It is normal for there to be a wide range of characteristics which are relevant for determining whether an individual is a member of a class, but none of which is possessed by all members of that class or exclusive to its members. In some cases there may be one or more features which happen to be universal and exclusive; but there is no reason why these should be indicative of its nature (for example, it may be that Picasso signed all his pictures; but the presence of his signature tells us nothing about the distinctive nature of a Picasso). Similarly, we may have a word which gives a spurious air of commonality where there are in fact no common features (for example, red and green are both colours, but they have nothing in common which distinguishes them from black and white). It is begging the question to assume that if there are any ‘threshold’ properties of graduateness (the lowest common denominator) they will also be ‘core’ properties (the basis of higher and more specialised manifestations of the essence of graduateness).

3.3.7. The confusion between threshold and core properties could have serious consequences. It is not simply a question of denying a degree to a few marginal candidates who might previously have scraped through, on the grounds that they lack a threshold property such as better oral communication skills than a non-graduate. Students who lacked that skill would have to be failed right across the ability range, including first-class scholars. The suggestion that there might be ‘compensation’ has the paradoxical consequence that graduates who barely passed would have more of the core properties of graduateness than many graduates with good degrees.

3.3.8. Since we are dealing with intellectual and other mental properties, it is unlikely that graduates will differ in kind from other members of the species homo sapiens, except in their varied masteries of specialist disciplines. The differences will be of degree. While it might be feasible (though not necessarily desirable) to set and assess minimum standards on a range of parameters, the same standards will be achievable by non-graduates — bright 14-year-olds, perhaps, or school rejects who have learned through the university of life. The project of defining graduateness in terms of threshold standards cuts at the roots of the traditional principle that the award of a degree marks the stage of progression from a successful period as a student. It is already the case that universities have shifted the balance of their activities in the direction of accreditation; but APEL carried to its logical conclusion (a degree without ever being a student), would damage universities’ core business as providers of higher education.

The function of the HEQC is to protect the right of higher education, as a profession, to regulate its own standards. If it fails to satisfy the Government that its mechanisms are sufficiently robust, the present or any future Government is likely to impose something worse, such as a national curriculum and testing, and the replacement of classified degrees by GNVQ level 4s. The Government’s agreement to set up a single agency with responsibility for both quality and standards is probably a victory for the HEQC; but the price for staving off external regulation is that the new body will have to have a firm policy on standards. The Graduate Standards Programme, and the Graduateness Project in particular, look like an attempt to appease the Government by setting common threshold standards, while allowing diversity to flourish at other levels. My conclusion is that the project is at best futile (and hence incapable of averting the external threat), and at worst sinister, as the first step towards replacing the current system of quality assurance by centralised (even if sector-owned) control over standards at all levels. The HEQC would be better employed defending the principle of the diversity of standards in a diverse and changing sector, and ensuring that institutions and subjects are accountable for delivering high quality education in accordance with their distinctive objectives.

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