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Methodology behind the 2024 Guardian University Guide

Saturday 9th September 2023

The compiler of the Guardian university league tables explains the technicalities of the process

We use eight measures of performance, covering all stages of the student lifecycle, to put together a league table for 66 subjects. We regard each provider of a subject as a department and ask each provider to tell us which of their students count within each department. Our intention is to indicate how likely each department is to deliver a positive all-round experience to future students and, in order to assess this, we refer to how past students in the department have fared. We quantify the resources and staff contact that have been dedicated to past students, we look at the standards of entry and the likelihood that students will be supported to continue their studies, before looking at how likely students are to be satisfied, to exceed expectations of success and to have positive outcomes after completing the course. Bringing these measures together, we get an overall score for each department and rank departments against this.

For comparability, the data we use focuses on full-time first-degree students. For those prospective undergraduates who have not decided which subject they wish to study, but who still want to know where institutions rank in relation to one another, the Guardian scores have been averaged for each institution across all subjects to generate an institution-level table.

Staff are good at explaining things.

Staff have made the subject interesting.

The course is intellectually stimulating.

My course has challenged me to achieve my best work.

The criteria used in marking have been clear in advance.

Marking and assessment has been fair.

Feedback on my work has been timely.

I have received helpful comments on my work.

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Taken from the RSS feed at https://www.theguardian.com/education/rss