Degrees of fashion 2

The grading of student work is inherently and inevitably rough. In most circumstances it is more a matter of judgment than of measurement. Marks are less precise than the algorithms used for honours degree classifications often imply. If the Burgess group, as a collectivity, had had a fuller appreciation of the variability in the awarding of marks, and of the multiplicity of factors affecting the cumulation of marks, it might have been prepared to follow through, rather than draw back from, the implications of the group's earlier conviction that "the current degree classification system is no longer fit for purpose".

Mantz Yorke, Lancaster University; Rick Allen, formerly of Anglia Ruskin University; Sally Brown, Leeds Metropolitan University; Jude Carroll, Berry O'Donovan, Margaret Price and Chris Rust, Oxford Brookes University; Marie Stowell, Worcester University; Graham Taylor-Russell, London Metropolitan University; Harvey Woolf, formerly of Wolverhampton University.