70% graduates get 2:1s or firsts

I imagine that it it will go up again and then stay at a similar level for years to come. With the cost of studying for graduates now being x3 than what it was then I think you'll find that students will start to work harder on their degree having spent so much on them.

With 47% of the population having a degree, the value of a degree is laughable. I honestly think three years work experience in your desired area of work > a degree. A degree teaches you how to quote others intelligence, nothing more.

As much as I'd love to stroll into a research lab and start work without a degree, it isn't possible. Degrees are required for some areas. Not all, but some.

With 47% of the population having a degree, the value of a degree is laughable. I honestly think three years work experience in your desired area of work > a degree. A degree teaches you how to quote others intelligence, nothing more.

Why would that help in anyway?

You still get a percentage anyway so you can look for that if you want to, but every person marks differently, so a 70 at London Met would not mean the same thing as 70 at Oxford. Having class honours are supposed to reflect a more coherent standards of performance. Judging from the fact that good universities usually come out of top in giving out firsts, it does seem fair.

Grade classifications are illogical. Someone with 59% is classed the same as someone with 50%, yet differently from someone with 60%, when clearly they are closer to the latter.

From a statistical point of view, you lose information by converting point estimates into fuzzy categories.

Distributions of grades do not have peaks corresponding to the classifications. If they did, you could kind of justify them. But you tend to get some kind of normal distribution. In this case, it makes no statistical sense to set ordinal categories. If you did this kind of thing in science, you would get criticized.

That league table of firsts awarded might as well be a list of entry grades factored against proportion of stem graduates.

Degree classifications wont be around for that much longer http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/gpa-pilot-takes-off/2008618.article

With 47% of the population having a degree, the value of a degree is laughable. I honestly think three years work experience in your desired area of work > a degree. A degree teaches you how to quote others intelligence, nothing more.

Competent faculties recognize when people are wasting their time getting a third in a subject they have no aptitude for and encourage them to do something else. Not one single person in my graduating class got a third, and only those of us that did basically nothing most of the time we were there got 2.2s. That's really the way it should be.

And thts why im gonna do a one year placement

No one who has a clue thinks that the typical person on the street could enroll at Imperial and have a 70% chance of achieving a 2:1 or higher.

Pretty much the same at my university too.

If I got a 3rd i'd be tempted to just leave it off my CV altogether tbh. At least with a 2.2 you can pass it off by saying you had other priorities (e.g work or being involved with a society) or simply found some modules difficult, that it taught you to assess your weaknesses and where you went wrong which is a good skill. A third just implies that you are completely unmotivated and didn't put any effort in.

The thing is a 70 in an institution in a certain discipline means a different thing for a 70 in another discipline (or different modules within the same discipline or assessment items within the same course.

Case in point: In an mathematics examination, 70 is ****; in history, 70 is excellent. You cannot really solve this problem because the marks were calculated very differently. The objectiveness, the definition of 'correctness', or even merely the fact that given an essay, no normal human being would grade it 98% regardless of how good it is.

Class honours then standardise the scores across disciplines. The other way of doing it obviously is to make a curve and say the Top 10% gets an A and make a grade-point average instead (you still cannot use the hard scores unless you adjust everything), but that is inherently wrong and unfair on the individuals.

Likewise, universities all have the vague understanding that a 'first' is for someone who performs really, really well, '2:1' is good', and so on; and the degrees are somewhat standardised that way.

You may get a normal distribution across all disciplines and universities, but unless you think maths graduates are incredibly better than everybody else, I don't see how using only scores would work. You are just assuming that a 70 in an exam means the same thing in another, which is simply not true. It makes no statistical sense to even compare the scores when the assessments were done so differently with many scores (basically) arbitrary.

To be honest, I put very little effort in for my 2.2 and I leave it off my CV partly for that reason (but mostly because it isn't relevant or helpful for the jobs I apply for). To me a third implies both laziness AND lack of aptitude.

This is conditional probability that you have a 70% chance of getting a 2:1 or more if you reach the standard required by Imperial to get into the course in the first place, which a lot of people wouldn't.I would like to see statistics account for the likelihood of getting into the University because that as well as the chance of getting a 1st/2:1 once into the University gives more meaningful statistics then Imperial would be much further down.This why that table of firsts is pretty much meaningless to any good employer and why degrees from very good Russell Group Universities are actually worth much much more than other universities.