Dr Padraig Walsh (right), is CEO of the Irish Universities Quality Board and is also a member of the Board of the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA), and the Steering Committee of the European University Association Institutional Evaluation Programme (EUA-IEP). 

Dr Walsh's comments below relate solely to the university sector, since that is the area for which the Irish Universities Quality Board (IUQB) has a remit.

Grade inflation
The issue of ‘so-called” grade inflation has been reasonably well articulated in the media. There certainly was an increase in the percentage of students graduating with 1st class honours from the universities in the period 1994 to 2004, largely due to the response of universities to comments from external examiners that Irish students were being disadvantaged by the reluctance to award the top grade.

The HEA Facts and Figures (which are published on the HEA website) for 2004 to 2008 show that the percentage of 1st class honours awarded in Honours Bachelor’s degrees (level 8) in the seven Irish universities in this period were 13%, 15%, 13%, 14% and 14 %.

It must be noted, however, that there is a greater variation in the award of 1st class honours between different disciplines in the same university than there is between the same disciplines in different universities. This variation is largely due to traditional marking practices in the different disciplines and this data should be highlighted and be subject to further research and analysis. This variation is also very much evident in the UK system.

‘Regulatory failure’ by IUQB
”The Irish universities Quality Board... (has) overseen a collapse in academic standards that threaten(s) Ireland’s economic future”.
“The regulatory authorities – ... the Irish Universities Quality Board – have much to answer."

IUQB is NOT a regulatory body. There is no prescribed national curriculum for universities. Irish universities are autonomous institutions. They make their own awards and are responsible for developing, delivering and assessing the content of the programmes that they deliver. They are also responsible for quality assuring their own awards.

To facilitate this, they utilise a system of external examiners, appointed by the universities themselves. The system of assessing and grading of students by the teacher themselves, its supervision by internal examinations boards, the rules, schemes and thresholds are decided by the universities themselves, and the input of the external examiners to check this process describes the university’s internal quality assurance system.

Since 1997, the Universities Act requires universities to undertake evaluations of each of their academic departments using external experts from Ireland and overseas and to publish the reports arising out of these evaluations (all of these reports are available on the university’s website and are accessible directly from the IUQB website). This is a further element to the universities’ internal quality assurance system.

The 1997 Act also required each university Board (governing authority) to commission a review (every 15 years) of the effectiveness each university’s internal QA system.

In 2002, the governing authorities of the 7 Irish universities established the Irish Universities Quality Board and passed this external review function over to it.

So IUQB was established to commission periodic reviews of the effectiveness of the internal QA systems in each of the 7 universities. All 7 universities were evaluated (by external international experts) in 2004 with the reports published in 2005. The reports contain findings and recommendations, not accreditations.

A 2nd cycle of reviews was agreed in March 2009. The first university evaluation (of NUIM) will be published on 16 March, following an IUQB Board meeting on 15 March. The second evaluation report (of DCU) will be published on 15 June. The other universities will follow at the rate of 2 per year.

Performance and International Standing of Irish Universities
The performance of the Irish university sector is not ‘average’. In the Times Higher Education (THE) International University rankings in 2009, 1 of the Irish universities was ranked in the world’s top 50, 1 in the world’s top 100 and all 7 Irish universities were ranked in the top 200 universities in Europe (there are over 800 research universities in Europe alone).

The top 3 countries with the best national university systems are (according to the THE 2008 system strength survey) the US, UK and Australia. The universities in these countries are (in common with Ireland) all largely self-regulating and self awarding. Ireland’s university system is ranked as 17th on this survey. The only country with a population similar to Ireland ranked higher (at 14th) is New Zealand (another system with high level of university autonomy).