Oxford Gossip...

That's a really interesting article - thanks for the link. Not directly relevant to me, since getting a mean mark ~2% higher than yours apparently makes me somehow a class above you , but interesting - I've always thought it's silly of universities to impose any kind of cut-off, seeing as a candidate who got a 2.2 from Oxford would probably have managed a 2.1 at a 'lesser' university - using a 2.1 as the gold standard seems to penalise people for being near the bottom of an excellent cohort, which doesn't seem fair.

When did the whole "2.1 = ESSENTIALWEAR" thing happen, anyway? My dad got a 2.2 in Politics from a mediocre university and managed to get a reasonably good job, back in the early 70s, and I have plenty of friends whose mums and dads tell a similar story.

Controversial first half - sure flocks of people from "lesser" university are going to descend on this thread to tell you off.

I think it's similar to the "grade inflation" at university admissions, with AAA\AAB being pretty much universal for good courses at good universities, where in the past the cut-off was much lower. There are many more people with a degree now that it can't be considered an automatic badge of excellence, and using the degree classification provides an objective standard of something which can be applied to screen applicants fairly easily.

Providing the situation that the most important difference is between the two divisions of second class degrees, rather than between 1 and 2* or 2 and 3, which seems counterintuitive.

There was an article in the Guardian work section on "what to do with your 2.ii" which covered a lot of the same ground. It also mentioned that blanket use of the 2.i\2.ii boundary as a screen discriminates against people who aren't white, middle-class women.

*except in prestige\prospects for further study terms.

Do you have a link to that Guardian article, or any details to make it Googleable?