The internal email was brought to the attention of BBC NI by an anonymous whistle blower who claimed that lecturers felt pressure to not only inflate undergraduate marks but also post-graduate qualifications.
This was refuted by a QUB spokesperson who said it “completely and absolutely refutes any suggestion that staff in its Business School have been put under pressure of any kind to inflate the grades of our students”.
The email was sent during the May 2024 marking period and detailed that Queens were awarding marks “around 7 percentage points less” than other Russel Groups, and that in order to match the degree classifications of other Russel Groups, the Business school need to be projecting average marks of 62-66 as opposed to the current average of 59.
The email asked staff to “please bear this in mind while marking and moderating modules”.
The spokesperson also said that the university has “a stringent oversight mechanism” and that “drawing on data from comparable universities and programmes is one aspect of this process”.
Queen’s is a member of the Russel Group, a group of 24 leading universities across the UK and are known for being academically competitive.
A named member of staff conducted analysis that was also enclosed in the email, revealing that the percentage of Business Management degrees that were awarded a 1st in Queen’s was considerably lower than other Russell Groups.
These claims were unequivocally denied in a statement by a QUB spokesperson saying "As a leading university across the UK and Ireland, and member of the Russell Group, we - like other universities - apply a variety of metrics to continuously benchmark our students against a range of peer institutions in relation to student outcomes and the employability prospects of our graduates.”