Top university calls time on ‘third-class’ degrees

Singapore’s top ranked Nanyang Technological University, or NTU, has become the second university in Singapore to ditch British-style honours degree classifications to eliminate ‘third-class’ degrees and “better reflect” their students’ capabilities, the university said.

All undergraduates – except those studying medicine – graduating from NTU after January 2018 will no longer get first, upper second, lower second or third class degree classifications which is the norm in Britain and many Commonwealth countries; instead they will switch to classifications more common in the United States, and eliminate third-class honours degrees altogether.

Unlike the US system where specialisation occurs much later, undergraduate honours degrees are normally awarded to students completing a three-year university course in a specialised discipline with three- or four-year general degrees known simply as bachelor degrees without the honours tag.

The problem is that the lower level non-honours degree awarded with merit often sounded better than a third-class honours degree.

According to a communication to students this month from NTU’s Deputy Provost for Education, Kam Chan Hin, the new nomenclature is meant to "reflect the rising quality of student intake over the years" and would “better reflect and recognise the academic accomplishments of our graduates in an increasingly competitive global employment market”.

The current First-Class Honours will be known as Honours (Highest Distinction), Second-Class (Upper) Honours as Honours (Distinction), and Second-Class (Lower) Honours as Honours (Merit). A Third-Class Honours or a Pass with Merit will become Honours.

The change-over all but acknowledges the stigma currently associated with third-class degrees – an issue that has surfaced in other countries using the same classification system. But the much more complex issue of maintaining quality by changing the grade boundaries has been avoided.

The university said the academic standards and cumulative grade point average scores required to achieve each degree classification will not change.

“This is a small step towards breaking the decades of prejudice against those awarded a lower class of honours degree,” Singapore’s Straits Times newspaper said in an editorial on 12 October. “This former classification did have a negative impact, especially when a student sought to apply to other institutions for further studies.”

The National University of Singapore or NUS had already announced a similar change in 2014 – despite some opposition in academic circles – saying it wanted to “better recognise” its students’ academic successes. The first NUS students graduated with the new style classifications last year.

Tan Eng Chye, deputy president for academic affairs at NUS, who championed the change-over at that university told University World News: “Students who have gone to [study] honours [degrees] are really the cream of our students. To say that they are second class or third class does not sound nice, and that’s why we changed the names.”

Students hide their degree class

In applications and printed visiting cards which often include qualifications, “many students try to hide if they are second class (lower) or third class lower”, leaving off the classification entirely, he said.

The change was “a sensible thing to do; we do not have to stick to old practices”, Tan said, referring to the previous system stemming from the British colonial era. “But we did not change the standards at all. The standards are still based on the GPA [grade point average].”

He added the full transcripts that indicate how well a student has done are available. “Your degree should provide more information to employers and that is what we tried to do.”

But Singapore Management University or SMU said it was not intending to make a similar change, away from using Latin classifications common in US universities such as Harvard and Yale.

“We use an established system which is well familiar in the US and very familiar here,” says Lily Kong, provost of SMU, referring to summa cum laude and magna cum laude distinctions adopted by SMU since 2000.

Other Singaporean universities are sticking to the old British-style classification system, which includes the third-class honours degree.

With public-funded universities in Singapore now adopting different nomenclature in issuing degrees, some academics have suggested there may be confusion when students apply for postgraduate studies abroad. Kong defended the universities’ different approaches. Singapore has had at least two systems for at least 17 years when SMU began to use Latin nomenclature, she said.

Other countries, including the UK, have debated scrapping the third-class degree, in part because ‘grade inflation’, allowing two-thirds or more students to be awarded upper-second and first-class degrees, have meant that those awarded lower-second and third-class degrees feel particularly disadvantaged in the competition for jobs compared to the past when first-class degrees were much rarer.