Academic standards

Academic standards are the benchmarks of quality and excellence in education such as the rigour of curricula and the difficulty of examinations. The creation of universal academic standards requires agreement on rubrics, criteria or other systems of coding academic achievement. At colleges and universities, faculty are under increasing pressure from administrators to award students good marks and grades without regard for those students' actual abilities, both to keep those students in school paying tuition and to boost the schools' graduation rates. Students often use course evaluations to criticize any instructor who they feel has been making the course too difficult, even if an objective evaluation would show that the course has been too easy. It is very difficult to find a direct correlation between the quailty of the course and the outcome of the course evaluations.

Student evaluations are a controversial method of assessing academic achievement. Recent studies have correlated high student evaluation of instructors with high grades rather than mastery of content.Studies have also noted that students understanding of assessment criteria can lead to enhanced learning experiences.

According to a 2009 report by UNESCO, changes in the university structure in the late 20th and early 21st century have led to increasing access to or "massification" of higher education which has, in turn, resulted in both a diversification of the student population but also a general decrease in academic standards globally.

In the UK, degree awarding bodies themselves are responsible for standards in higher education, but these are checked during inspection by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) and the Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation (Ofqual). On its website QAA defines academic standards as 'The standards set and maintained by institutions for their courses (programmes and modules) and expected for their awards.'

The Dearing Report recommended in 1997 that benchmarking be used to measure and improve academic standards. From 1997 to 2011 this was done by code of practice and other guidelines known as the Academic Infrastructure. During 2012-13, this was replaced by the Quality Code for Higher Education, which included points about the availability of information about the learning experience to emphasize the role of the student as a paying customer of the institutions.

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