Oxford Brookes University has become the first in the United Kingdom to adopt US-style grade point averages (GPA) as a counterpart to traditional British degree classifications, it was announced this week.

The Oxford Brookes initiative would give students an average of their marks over the three years of university, in contrast to the output focus of the traditional classification scheme, in an attempt to reduce the significance of “cliff-edges”, where students miss the boundary of a class by just a mark or two, which finds favour with some Cambridge students.

Lauren Wilson, a second-year Christ’s student, said that the proposal would be a “safety net” that would reduce the damage caused by a “blip” in final exams. On the other hand, a fellow Christ’s student felt that as university is for many a “transitory time”, the traditional classification scheme had more merit in that it allows employers to judge what “their potential employees are achieving towards the ends of their degrees”.

The move follows recent attempts from various universities to consider alternatives to the increasingly criticised honours system of Firsts and 2.1s, described by some critics, such as universities minister David Willetts, as a “blunt instrument”. One British alternative is the Higher Education Achievement Report (HEAR), last year adopted by at least 90 universities, which provides graduates with their marks for individual modules as well as a transcript taking account of extracurricular activities.

Cambridge, often regarded as the birthplace of the modern examination and quantitative grading scheme thanks to the 1792 Tripos reforms of chemistry professor William Farish, has so far shunned attempts to move away from the familiar system of classifications.

Asked to comment on the move, a Cambridge University spokesman confirmed that it “has no plans to introduce a GPA at the present time”, which, in common with its rejection of the HEAR last year appears to indicate a continued confidence in the conventional classification system.  

The Grade Point Average system, as applied in the USA, attempts to rank students by ability across a range of disciplines by collating a mean average of letter marks (that is, ABCD and F), which are quantified as 0-4 numerically and then averaged. The maximum mark, indicating the perfect score of all As is 4.0. The US-UK Fulbright Commission, by way of comparison, considers a GPA of 3.67 to be the upper boundary of the British 2.1, though analysis of the postgraduate admissions requirements for various courses at British universities indicates a variation in this comparison: for instance, Oxford considers 3.75+ GPA as the equivalent of a First. 

However, the system as applied at Oxford Brookes would neither do away with the British system, preferring the GPA only as a counterpart, nor use the GPA as it is in the United States, as a method of assessing aptitude across different disciplines (sciences, arts and so forth) in accordance with the reliance on majors and minors in different subjects.