Last week the Guardian reported that a government-sponsored "scoping" group is to meet soon to consider scrapping the degree-classification system in general use in UK universities, and replacing it with "alternative methods for presenting the overall achievement of students".
Better late than never.
Over 10 years ago - 15 June 1993 to be precise - I wrote an article for the Guardian trailing the first national conference of UK academics convened to consider the future of the classified honours degree. More than 100 academics, administrators and employers' representatives attended, covering between them the spectrum of old and new universities, higher education colleges and other stakeholders. I still have a rare copy of the published proceedings.
The arguments against the classified honours degree have not changed in the intervening decade, but the expansion and diversification of higher education in the UK has sharpened them, and made their resolution more urgent.
The classification of degrees, primarily bachelors' degrees, is a peculiarly British - indeed English - institution and, as the history of British universities goes, is a comparatively recent innovation.
Nowadays most UK bachelors' degrees are divided into firsts, upper seconds, lower seconds, thirds and passes without honours. It was not always thus.
In the 16th century the Regius professor of divinity at Cambridge employed what we would now call "norm referencing" to distinguish the top 25% of candidates, the next 50% and the bottom 25%. There was no attempt to define what attributes any one student would need to show to be included in the top 25%. In law, Cambridge undergraduates were simply ranked from the best to the worst each year.
The classification system UK universities now operate was not fully developed until after the 1918. Even so, Oxford retained fourth class honours - and an undivided second class - until the 1970s. As I wrote in 1993, to get a fourth (as did one former post-war Lord Chancellor, now deceased) was reckoned to be quite an achievement, which seems to have enhanced rather than diminished one's career prospects.
And we might note en passant that the medical degrees of Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (the qualifications possessed by most GPs) have never been classified. Nor has the PhD, though there is a world of difference between the doctoral thesis whose brilliance shouts at you from every page and the thesis that only managed to pass after extensive rewriting.
But what do all these "classes" mean? In my experience they mean very little. The historic emphasis in British universities on performance in a set of written examinations has generally meant that firsts are awarded to those who perform best (whatever that means) under exam conditions. The problem is, life is not lived under exam conditions. And over the past decade there has been a welcome diversification of assessment methods, placing much greater emphasis on project work and even on oral skills, assessed over a period of time.
Few employers in my experience have any real idea what differentiates an upper second from a lower second. The Quality Assurance Agency now asks us to produce "programme specification templates", but nobody other than programme validation panels and QAA inspectors ever bothers to read them. And if they did, they would not gain a great deal of information about the totality of academic, let alone personal, strengths and attributes of any one particular student.
At bottom, a degree classification can only be described as the crudest of summaries, concealing a great deal more than it appears to reveal. A student may have exited with a lower second, but may have excelled in those subjects relevant to a subsequent employment. A degree classification diploma will just not show this. American university students, by contrast, receive a detailed transcript when they graduate, showing the courses they've taken and the grades they've obtained, with explanation, as they have progressed through their undergraduate careers.
When we convened the 1993 conference a certain amount of anxiety was expressed by employers that the abolition of the classified honours degree would somehow involve a lowering of standards. It won't. The abolition of classification has nothing whatever to do with the maintenance of standards. Students' work will be assessed as before. But rather than being assigned a "class", which they will carry around with them for life, each graduating student will be given a transcript, which will be much more useful.
· Professor Geoffrey Alderman is vice-president of American InterContinental University. He writes in a personal capacity.