Universities 'dumb down' and ignore cheating, MPs told

Universities should be stripped of their powers to award degrees if evidence emerges that they have "dumbed down", MPs heard yesterday.

Professor Geoffrey Alderman, the former academic chairman who caused uproar last year by claiming lecturers were under pressure to "mark positively" and turn a blind eye to plagiarism, told a Commons Select committee monitoring higher education that there had been a "systematic failure" to maintain degree standards for the past 20 years.

"In particular, vice-chancellors have permitted and indeed encouraged the decline in academic standards in the desperate search for (a) increased income from 'full cost' fee-paying international students, (b) more favourable student retention rates, and (c) high or higher positions in various 'rankings' or 'league tables' published by a variety of media," Professor Alderman said.

"Failing or expelling a non-European Union student can have serious knock-on implications as the word gets out. In the modern, mass higher education system, it seems, there must be prizes for all because the student is the customer and the customer must walk away with something for his or her money."

He said the only way to sustain standards was to give tougher powers to the sector's watchdog, the Quality Assurance Agency, to crack down on universities. "The current situation, whereby universities enjoy degree-awarding powers in perpetuity, is insupportable," he said."Where an institution is found to be derelict in its supreme duty to maintain standards ... financial penalties should be levied, followed, if necessary by the partial or complete withdrawal of the authority to award degrees."

He added: "The decline in academic standards has been facilitated by weak or non-existent survellance of them. Students who would formerly have failed their degrees are being passed and students who would formerly have been awarded very respectable lower seconds are now being awarded upper seconds and even firsts.

"Students – I mean British students as well as students from overseas – are being admitted to commence their studies with levels of English so poor that universities are having to run remedial English courses to ensure that new entrants possess at least a basic level of literacy at the ouset of their studies. Cheating is rampant, encouraged in part by lenient penalties."

He cited figures to show that the number of firsts awarded by universities had doubled in the past decade, while the student population had gone up by less than half. In addition, a survey by the Higher Education Academy had revealed 9,000 cases of plagiarism in the past year, only 143 of which had resulted in expulsion.

http://www.independent.co.uk/