On the up

Universities pledge to tackle grade inflation in the next 12 months

Back when Damian Hinds was education secretary, you couldn’t move for news stories about grade inflation. He loved coming out with some announcement about how terrible it was that students at university appeared to be doing better than they did back in the good old days, before instructing universities to do something about it.

Playbook is not naive enough to think that the increase in the number of firsts and 2:1s awarded over the past decade or two is entirely in line with improvements in teaching, even though we know full well that pedagogical improvement is at least partly responsible for the results that we see each year on graduation days.