First and second class degrees 'to be scrapped'

Britain's traditional system of first and second class degrees should be scrapped, an influential Government review says today.

Too many graduates are getting the best degrees and the 200-year-old classifications of firsts and upper and lower seconds should be replaced with something more discriminating, says Robert Burgess, vice-chancellor of Leicester University.

The proportion of people who leave university clutching a first or upper second has jumped by a third to 60 per cent in the last decade.

In a report published today, Professor Burgess says the traditional degree classifications, first used at Oxford University at the beginning of the 19th century, are no longer "fit for purpose".

Various options, including failing all candidates that do not pass every unit of their degree, should be considered, he says.

The review also paves the way for a national curriculum for universities and standardised degrees, threatening the long-standing independence of different institutions.

It calls for the units that make up each degree to be standardised along national, and eventually even EU, lines.

At the moment, universities design each degree according to their own requirements. But Professor Burgess says students will increasingly work part-time in future and will need to be able to take "credits" for each course they complete with them as they change universities in the UK and abroad.

However, Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Buckingham University, said previous attempts to introduce a credit transfer system had foundered on the fact that there was little demand among students for such flexibility.

They cared more about the prestige of the university that awarded the full degree, he said.

Education Secretary Charles Clarke ordered the review because he is keen to reform degrees to counter claims that universities are being dumbed down. But he also wants universities to be more attractive to a wider range of students before tuition fees rise to ?3,000 a year in 2006.

Another reform, demanded by Mr Clarke and backed by today's report, is that universities must devise a "value-added" formula showing how much progress each student makes from the end of school to graduation day.

In doing so, he has given universities a huge incentive to take state-educated students with inferior A-level grades ahead of straight A candidates from private schools so they can boast that their undergraduates make the most progress to prospective applicants and their parents.

Professor Smithers branded such a system a "nonsense".

Employers were only interested in results, not the progress students made to get them, he declared.

"If you are seeing how fast a person can run you don't worry about how fast they were initially," he said. "You are trying to find the fastest and the best and the same goes with degrees."

Professor Smithers said it would be better to improve the existing system than to abandon it and start all over again.

He added: "It isn't perfect but people are familiar with it and it is, as it were, honoured by tradition."