Nottingham Trent University (NTU) sees a 7% reduction in the number of graduates awarded first-class degree compared to previous year as a result of new marking system.
Final years who graduate in 2019 are the first cohort experiencing the fully revised marking and classification system that was implemented two years ago.
A spokesperson for NTU said that the current marking system, which is criterion-based, was introduced by the university to tackle the sector-wide challenge of ‘grade inflation’.
It is designed to be “simple, clear and fair for all students”.
“We have moved away from calculating grades on a scale of 0-100 and instead introduced a linear numerical system from 0-16 which is more representative of a student’s overall work.”
Mike Ratcliffe, the Academic Registry at NTU said there is a temptation for people to think about the number more than the grade in the number system.
“The grade-based system also provides a justification for the overall summative mark based on proportion of aspects that fall into different criteria,” Ratcliffe added.
Under the current system, criteria are based on the university’s overall academic quality scheme and translated into domains of individual courses and individual assessment.
“The way students demonstrate in the same grade in different disciplines is different from one to the other,” he said.
He also explained the rationale behind the 16-point numerical scale is to fit into the honour system (from Exceptional 1st to Fail) and to provide an underlying figure that is used to create an average when there is a mixture of grades in the middle range.
Bradley Fox, the president of Students’ Union (SU) at NTU and a member of the university’s Academic Board, worked with the Centre of Academic Development and Quality (CADQ) and discovered students would underperform under the old system.
“Students from BAME backgrounds were more likely to be disadvantaged,” Bradley told us.
“We probably reduce the first (classification) under the current marking system, but automatically it will advantage people.”
Alongside this revised system, the university has also removed the power of examination boards to make discretionary decision for students who are on the classification borderline.
By Qing Na