Students are being awarded Masters degrees having achieved standards they would once have faced as undergraduates, while PhDs no longer constitute a reliable qualification for academia, an academic argues today.

The comments from Kevin Sharpe, a professor of Renaissance studies at Queen Mary, University of London, will fuel fears that university standards are being dumbed down as institutions compete to recruit and retain more students and boost their standing in league tables.

Writing today in the Times Higher Education magazine, Professor Sharpe warns that the dilution of PhD standards is threatening "the status of the academic profession, indeed of scholarship and learning themselves".

"Just as bachelors degrees have become less demanding, so PhDs have become something quite different from what they were," he says.

"With many more students proceeding to university and to graduate studies, masters degrees are now, at best, doing little more than introducing students to the demands they would once have faced as undergraduates."

He adds: "Often even those with a masters degree now come to PhD study without the necessary grounding or learning to complete a piece of major research."

Professor Sharpe deplores the fact that funding councils and universities now insist that PhDs are completed within three years and impose draconian penalties for late submission.

"Rapid completion does not necessarily demonstrate either effective study or good supervision. It was always difficult to complete a very good PhD in three or four years. Most successful professors I know did not," he said.

He warns that English academics with post-graduate degrees may find themselves losing out in the competition for jobs to Americans with more robust qualifications.

Last month Professor Sharpe said that undergraduate degrees have become so dumbed-down they are no longer a serious test of students’ knowledge or intelligence.

The demise of traditional final exams means students can gain top marks simply by completing bite-size modules and coursework. All students have to do is "stay the distance" to earn top marks, he claimed.

His warnings come amid growing concern over the number of firstclass and 2:1 degrees being awarded. Since the mid-1990s, the number of top-class degrees awarded has more than doubled to 36,645.

Last year a record 175,390 students - almost two thirds of the total - left university in 2007 with a first or upper second-class degree, an increase of 3,330 on the previous year.

Professor Sharpe’s comments follow a warning from Geoffrey Alderman, former head of standards at the University of London, that the "league table culture" was to blame for a sharp rise in the number of first-class degrees awarded over the past decade.

Professor Alderman said that lecturers were under pressure to "mark positively" and turn a blind eye to plagiarism to ensure that universities climbed national and international rankings.

Peter Williams, chief executive of the Quality Assurance Agency, has also reported that the degree classification system is "arbitrary and unreliable".

A spokesman for Universities UK, representing Vice Chancellors, said that universities recognised there was a problem and were taking forward recommendations on the subject put forward by a group chaired by Robert Burgess, Vice-Chancellor, University of Leicester.

This recommended that traditional degree classifications should be replaced by a single document, known as the Higher Education Achievement Report (Hear).

The system, which will be piloted from this year, will give a detailed breakdown of student attainment and is expected eventually to become the main method of classifying degrees.

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