Alternative strategies for closing the award gap between white and minority ethnic students.

Louise Cramer

doi:10.7554/elife.58971

Abstract

In the United Kingdom, undergraduate students from Black, Asian and other minority ethnic backgrounds receive lower classes of degrees than white students, and similar gaps have been reported in other countries. Such award gaps limit ethnic diversity in academic research, and in the broader job market. Whilst there has been some success in reducing the award gap in the UK, a significant gap still persists. Here, based on an analysis of students studying cell biology at University College London, I show that differences in performance at exams contribute significantly more to the award gap than differences in performance in coursework. From these data, plus scrutiny of the literature, alternative policies are identified to speed up the closure of the award gap and to remove the barriers that prevent students from Black, Asian and other minority ethnic backgrounds from progressing to PhD and postdoctoral positions.

Highlights

In the United Kingdom (UK), 81.4% of white students and 68.0% of Black, Asian, and other minority ethnic (BAME) students are awarded good undergraduate degrees, which equates to an award gap of 13.4%
Despite students from Chinese and Indian ethnic backgrounds outperforming white students in university entrance exams in the UK, an award gap of 5% still exists for both of these minority groups (UK Government, 2020; AdvanceHE, 2020b). These analyses indicate that institutions themselves are responsible for the award gap between white and BAME students
How does the size and pattern of the award gap in subjects that do not examine by essays compare to those that mainly rely on coursework? the different assessment methods forced by the COVID-19 pandemic may help identify ‘what matters’. These results suggest that this strategy of dissecting individual components of a degree could reveal what is causing the award gap for a particular subject

Summary

Introduction

In the United Kingdom (UK), 81.4% of white students and 68.0% of Black, Asian, and other minority ethnic (BAME) students are awarded good undergraduate degrees (where good means a first or upper second), which equates to an award gap of 13.4% (see Methods for more details on the use of the term BAME in this article). A number of factors contribute to the relative size of the award gap for the final cell biology mark: the weighting for the coursework and to what extent the coursework mark can lift a student to a final grade band that is higher than that for the exam mark, and how far the exam is shifted to lower marks All these factors can vary by course (some are observable for example in Figure 3); and in these data the gap in first class marks awarded for the final module mark was greater than all good marks in year 2, 789:;"?96@A6BCD". Preliminary data, which is consistent with the UK pattern, looking at year 3 cell biology courses, the proportion of Black students awarded good grades for the final course mark (~38%) and for the exam (~38%) was up to 2-times lower than all minority ethnic students (BAME) for these two components (72.7% ± 3.7% and 64.1% ± 2.6, respectively). In the UK, Research England and Office for Students have recently announced a joint funding call to support initiatives to increase access and participation for minority ethnic postgraduate research students, initially planned for release in Autumn 2020 (but delayed due to COVID-19)

Conclusion

Findings

Methods