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YOU ARE IN » Home page > News and information main menu > Graduate Market Trends > Contemporary graduate achievement (Winter 07/08)

Recognising the breadth of contemporary graduate achievement (Winter 07/08)

• Summary
• Degree classification: a dodgy divide
• Employability is complex
• Claiming achievements
• References

Summary

Many employers nowadays require applicants to have gained an upper second class degree, but the current degree classification system cannot represent the breadth of students' achievements. Professor Mantz Yorke, Visiting Professor in the Department of Educational Research at Lancaster University and author of Grading Student Achievement in Higher Education: Signals and Shortcomings, suggests a way in which the current assessment system could be modified to help recruiters select the most appropriate candidates for their vacancies.

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Degree classification: a dodgy divide

The dividing-line between upper and lower second class degrees is of significance to many employers since it can be used in making an initial sift of applicants. However, it is at the point in the scale for classifying honours degrees where it is most difficult, statistically, to make a clean cut. Further, an overall classification can bundle together some very different kinds of achievement: for example, essay writing, numerical capability, competence with information technology, ability to work with others, and so on. So a graduate with a lower second class degree could, for some job opportunities, be superior to one with a better classification because the ‘fit’ between their achievements and the job and person specifications might be more appropriate.

Gradings for achievements are generally less precise than many believe. A percentage mark, for example, signals a broad level of achievement. It is a judgement rather than a measurement. It should not be treated as if it were a property such as length or mass, whose measurements can be added or averaged. Simplistically combining judgements of different kinds of achievement is likely to mislead. This is why a more disaggregated approach to the reporting of student achievement is necessary. The recent report of the Burgess Group, which was charged with reviewing the honours degree classification, has proposed a Higher Education Achievement Record (HEAR) which would provide, alongside the honours classification, a more differentiated picture of a graduate’s achievements [1]. However, where the classification and HEAR are both provided (as the Burgess Group recommended), the temptation for an employer will be to take the short cut and look first at the classification (and perhaps the institution attended) and only subsequently (if at all) at the HEAR.

There is plenty of evidence that employers, when recruiting graduates, look for a wide range of personal attributes and achievements – the latter not being limited to the academic domain but including what have come to be termed ‘soft skills’. Basically, they want graduates who will be effective in the job. Being effective means being able to integrate knowledge, skills and personal qualities in practical situations.

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Employability is complex

The Higher Education for Capability movement which was active during the 1990s promoted such integration when John Stephenson, its Director, argued that capable people had confidence in their ability to:

• take effective and appropriate action;
• explain what they were seeking to achieve;
• live and work effectively with others; and
• continue to learn from their experience.

Such people not only knew about their specialisms, but they also had the confidence to apply their knowledge and skills within varied and changing situations and to continue to develop their specialist knowledge and skill. It is hard to imagine any employer demurring.

More recently, the Enhancing Student Employability Co-ordination Team [ESECT], which brought together a range of parties with an interest in the development of students and the recruitment of graduates, developed the USEM account of employability which owes a lot to the pioneering work of John Stephenson and his colleagues. The USEM account is summarised in Figure 1, and is backed by theory and empirical evidence (details can be found in the series ‘Learning and Employability’ published by the Higher Education Academy and available on its website at www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/publications/learningandemployability).

Figure 1. The USEM account of employability.

The late Peter Knight referred to the work arena (and also to higher education itself) as demanding ‘wicked’ competences which are ‘achievements that cannot be neatly pre-specified, take time to develop and resist measurement-based approaches to assessment’ [2]. ‘Wicked’ competences are essential to a graduate’s employability. They may need the duration of a whole programme for their development (perhaps more, if a life-long perspective on learning is taken), and are unlikely to be developed fully in single modules of study. So an assessment regime that in effect treats modules as self-contained entities may do a disservice to the recognition of a graduate’s employability. Adding or averaging module marks to produce an honours degree classification obscures, rather than reveals.

Implicit in Figure 1 is the integration of skills, understandings and personal attributes that make graduates more likely to gain employment and be successful in their chosen occupations. It is this integration that provides a considerable challenge to assessment in higher education. Ticking off achievements against a list of desired skills (an approach favoured by some institutions) is inadequate. Michael Eraut writes, in the context of medical education but clearly with wider relevance [3]:

“treating [required competences] as separate bundles of knowledge and skills for assessment purposes fails to recognize that complex professional actions require more than several different areas of knowledge and skills. They all have to be integrated together in larger, more complex chunks of behaviour.”

What thoughts do Knight’s and Eraut’s observations prompt, regarding the connection between assessment and employability?

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Claiming achievements

Students in the UK are expected to undertake personal development planning (PDP) and to build up a portfolio of achievements to which they can refer when applying for jobs. At present, uptake has been patchy, partly because academics and students tend to see this as ‘just another chore’, and because the latter tend to see no direct relationship to learning and assessment. The benefit is seen as slender when compared with the effort required (one student, responding to a survey of the first year experience in the UK wrote: ‘I … felt the PDP compulsory meetings were a total waste of time – sorry!’).

If, however, students were required to make a claim for their award, rather than have the award determined by some computational algorithm, PDP would gain in potency. The requirement would encourage the metacognitive activities of reflection and self-regulation, which are valued by employers. Requiring students to claim for their award would, in effect, ask the student to answer the question: ‘How have you satisfied, through your work, the aims stated for your particular programme of study?’. The multidimensionality of employability suggests that students from the same cohort might make quite different cases for their award whilst fulfilling the broad expectations set out for it. For example, one might centre the claim on a developed capacity to relate the disciplinary content to practical situations whereas another might opt to make a case based on high levels of academic achievement. Differentiated information such as this ought to be useful to employers.

The claims-making approach is not limited to students who enter higher education straight from school, since it can be adapted to the needs of older students who bring greater life-experience to their studies.

A student’s claim could be required to consist of not only their record of achievements in curricular components, but also to incorporate evidence from learning experiences such as those generated through work placement. (Where work placements can lead to grades, these grades are usually weighted lightly in the overall assessment.) ‘Wicked’ competences could be more clearly brought into the picture. The preparation of a claim would assist the student in making applications for jobs (as most will want to do), and the institution in preparing supporting references. When the claim is used prospectively, as in applying for a job, relevant extra-curricular experience could also be brought into play since this could indicate to a potential employer some attributes and achievements that it might value but which are not highlighted in the higher education experience (for example, voluntary work and juggling successfully with multiple demands on one’s time).

Some might object that claims-making would increase the complexity of assessment and recruitment. Regarding the former, the claims-making approach would not be a ‘bolt-on’ activity at the end of a student’s time in higher education: rather, it would require some radical rethinking about the design and implementation of assessment if it is not to add to the burden on academics. Recruiters, on the other hand, might argue that having to deal with a fuller account of applicants’ achievements would be more expensive in terms of time and effort. But if recruitment is seen in terms of investment, then it is likely to be worthwhile to make an extra effort at the recruitment stage in order to reduce the chances of making a less than optimal choice, whose cost may only appear after a period of time.

The assessment of student achievement is dominated by thinking that still reflects the circumstances of a system which catered for an elite minority. This thinking does not fit the needs of a mass higher education system and its stakeholders. It is time for change.

References

1. Universities UK and GuildHE (2007) Beyond the honours degree classification: The Burgess Group final report. London: Universities UK and GuildHE. Available at http://bookshop.universitiesuk.ac.uk/downloads/Burgess_final.pdf (accessed 17 October 2007).

2. Knight, P. (2007) Fostering and assessing ‘wicked’ competences. Available at http://www.open.ac.uk/cetl-workspace/cetlcontent/documents/460d1d1481d0f.pdf (accessed 10 October 2007).

3. Eraut, M. (2004) A wider perspective on assessment. Medical Education, 38 (8), pp.803-4.

Content last updated: Feb 2008