Cum laude applies to a student who achieves an eight or higher for all subjects on their course. If more than a third of students manages that, isn’t that on the high side, academic staff members asked last November. The annual report notes that the percentages are “relatively high”, especially “when considered on a national level”. Although associate dean Wilko Letterie considers it an important topic, it is “not currently urgent and other issues deserve priority” (i.e., the potential consequences for the SBE as a result of the plans regarding internationalisation and education cuts).
Exception?
According to what the chair of the Board of Examiners, Stefan Straetmans, told Observant, the quality is not in doubt. “That the cum laude percentage is increasing doesn’t mean that the degree programme is any easier than before.” Or that there is structural overmarking: “Periodically, a random selection of Master’s theses is rechecked by people who were not previously involved.” These ‘new’ assessments were more or less the same as the ‘old’ ones. “Moreover, there are never any remarks about excessive cum laudes in the reports from accreditation bodies such as NVAO or EQUIS.”
The question remains how percentages as high as 40 percent can be achieved. Shouldn’t cum laude be an exception? Or did a programme such as Business Analytics simply have that many excellent students? Rudolf Müller, programme leader for the relatively new programme, thinks their motivation certainly played a part. In the first graduating class (in 2022-2023), twelve of the thirty students graduated cum laude. “The better students, particularly, manage to graduate in three years,” says Müller. “I think we need three or four cohorts to reach a ‘steady state’ and be able to compare with other programmes.”
Not that out of the ordinary
Last academic year, the number of cum laude graduates for Business Analytics and Business Engineering dropped, the former to 12 percent, the latter to 21. International Business remained more or less the same. “But 20 percent is not that out of the ordinary,” says Straetmans.
Laurie Delnoij, exam expert for the Educational Research Department and chair of the SBE exam committee, also thinks that high numbers of cum laude graduates are not necessarily a problem. “Cum laude is often seen as an honour reserved for a select group of students. However, the average on which that distinction is based often comes from ‘a criteria-based assessment system’ – so too for SBE”: whoever meets the criteria is awarded high grades, and thus achieves a high average, regardless of how fellow students perform. “This can lead to varying percentages of cum laude without having any bearing on the exclusivity or value of it.” Mostly, she feels it’s important that being awarded cum laude “is the result of a robust, transparent and fitting evaluation system”.
Across UM as a whole, the average number of cum laude graduates for Bachelor's programmes varies widely: from 2 to 5 percent for the Faculties of Law and Health, Medicine and Life Sciences, to 23 percent for the Faculty of Science and Engineering (which also includes the University Colleges in Maastricht and Venlo and the Maastricht Science Programme).
Intimidation by students
Another possible explanation for the high grades posited during the Faculty Council was intimidation by students. According to Marc van Ekert, member on behalf of academic staff, students put pressure on young teachers and tutors. Chair of the Board of Examiners Straetmans “doesn’t exclude this” as a possibility, but refers to the role of the course coordinators. “They have to hold tutor meetings, develop grading schemes, and regularly discuss the results and any remarkable discrepancies.”
Programme leader Müller doubts that intimidation is really to blame. Final grades, he says, are often made up of partial grades, which “makes it hard to manipulate the final result”.