For centuries, Cambridge undergraduates have known exactly how they did in exams compared to their peers. No more. Under changes that will take effect from the next academic year, students at Fen Polytechnic will only be told about their class rankings if they ask their tutors, in a move designed to reduce “self-imposed competitive pressure” among undergraduates.

As with most things Cambridge, there is a long backstory to the announcement. In the past, class lists, which showed every student’s examination results, were displayed publicly on notice boards in front of Senate House, where university ceremonies are held. In 2016, a management proposal to abolish the class lists was decisively rejected by Cambridge’s governing body, after a grassroots student-led campaign fought for its retention.

But Covid-19 proved a convenient excuse to kill the class lists, whose public display was discontinued by stealth in 2020 and for good in 2021, when no one was paying attention. The decision to stop telling students their class rank is simply the inevitable and logical next step to the elimination of the class lists displays, in the name of mental health.

The obvious lesson offered by the demise of class rankings at Cambridge is that managerial elites always get their way in the end, if they want it enough. But this pushback against ranking forms part of a broader trend within elite universities in Britain and elsewhere, which discourages competition among students, but only once you are admitted.

No one is admitted to Cambridge unless they are academically exceptional; and no one gets into an elite American university unless they are academically exceptional and can spin a good yarn in their personal statement. Admission rates at elite universities have fallen in recent years, while students with perfect grades find themselves rejected by places which a generation ago were viewed as safety schools for the lazy and the dim but rich. The competitive pressure on students seeking admission has, unsurprisingly, grown to breaking point.

But once universities have admitted their hand-picked classes, they are evidently keen to downplay the importance of competition. After all, the logic seems to go, you are here and therefore exceptional, so you do not need to prove anything to anyone. Out with class lists, in with therapeutic alpacas and mindfulness sessions.

The flattening of the grading curve is one typical result. Grade inflation has been relatively modest at Oxbridge; but in elite American universities, it can be difficult to graduate without gaining some sort of honours (at one point, nine-tenths of graduating Harvard undergraduates had obtained Latin honours — they are now capped to merely the top 50% of the graduating class).

For many years, Princeton was the sole Ivy League holdout with a policy of grade deflation, but had to abandon it when it became clear it put its graduates at a disadvantage compared to other institutions. Nor is this confined to undergraduate degrees: many elite American law schools have effectively switched to a pass-fail system.

This makes sense from the viewpoint of modern universities, which are now brands — with a reputation to manage — as much as they are educational institutions. If Harvard has more than a handful of C students, it undermines the mystique of the Harvard degree. Much better, therefore, to keep the competitive pressures confined to the admissions stage, while eliminating them for those who are allowed inside.

In any case, as modern undergraduates know, the real point of attending one of the hard-to-get-into universities is less about academic excellence than what really matters: the scramble for the first corporate job, the seed money, the billionaire-endowed fellowship whose purpose nobody quite understands. Academic performance counts for these things, but only so much.

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Yuan Yi Zhu is an academic and writer.

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