The standard of British postgraduate programmes is very high. The quality and standards of every programme are controlled in a number of ways, in part by each university itself and in part by quality assurance systems of other organisations.
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Some national governments insist that they will only give their own scholarships and support to students who go to study in a department rated at grade 4 or above (or sometimes grade 5 or above). Clearly this may mean that you have no choice. But, if you do have a choice, be prepared to consider other universities, since RAE ratings are not everything. And remember that even grade 1 rated departments may have individual staff with great expertise either as researchers or in teaching at Masters or Doctoral levels, and even grade 5 rated departments may have staff who are less good researchers or teachers.
Some guide books, and some of the published league tables, make use of Teaching Quality data from the QAA. These data are based on individual inspections of subject departments in universities, and give a score out of 24 for the quality of teaching. Most departments score 18–24 marks. The quality inspection system has now changed, so that it does not use a scoring system at all, and the data used are from the period 1992–2002 – some may therefore be over ten years old. We would not recommend placing any reliance on such data to indicate teaching quality.
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Every university, for example, has to meet the standards imposed by the national QAA, which sets out general standards about Masters programmes and Doctorates. These standards are checked in universities by inspection visits, known as audits, and the results are published on the
QAA website.
In addition, any programme that has a professional component (for example in teacher training, or in engineering or medicine) has to gain approval from a relevant professional body. For example, a postgraduate programme in Marketing will be accredited by the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) as well as leading to the award of a university Masters degree. Following a programme accredited by a professional organisation can be important in getting a job after you graduate, and if you want to take a programme in a professional field you should check which professional accreditation is essential and which is advisable. You can do this by checking with the relevant professional body in the UK (use the internet) or, if there is one, the equivalent professional body in your own country.
Thirdly, all programmes are checked for standards by a system of external examiners. External examiners are usually academic staff from a different university who look at the work of students on the programme and write an annual report on the quality and standards of the programme.
In addition universities are required to publish on this website a range of information about the nature, quality and character of each degree programme, and you can search the site by university and programme.
And then there are the league tables! Over the past ten years the British media have started to produce performance tables to compare universities. These are not official publications, for they are not produced by the universities themselves or by the UK government. They are produced by national newspapers using data that are available from official sources. The most well-known league tables listed in the Further information section.
How helpful are league tables?
They have the advantage of giving a quick impression of relative quality and can certainly help you distinguish the very best from the very worst. But they need to be read with care and not used as the only source of information, because they have a number of problems:
• Each newspaper calculates its table in its own way using a complicated formula that balances academic achievements and facilities, and it is not always easy to know exactly how the calculation has been done. The newspapers producing the tables are often trying to emphasise particular aspects of universities – for example
The Guardian tables put very little weighting on a university’s research income and achievements but put more weighting on its undergraduate teaching achievements.
• The data used are not always up-to-date.
• In most tables the ‘score’ difference in the table is quite small. This means that there may be very little difference between universities that are separated by many places, and year by year universities can move up or down a long way with only a small change in their data.
• The data in the tables are mainly about research and about undergraduate programmes, so they may not be very helpful in choosing a postgraduate programme.
It is now possible for you to make your own league table using the weightings that you think are important to you. This facility is available on
The Times newspaper website – but remember that the basic data in the table is still that used to make The Times league table.
So, you should treat league tables with caution, and look at several before you decide what the tables are telling you about a particular subject in a particular university. On the other hand, the universities take the tables seriously, know that potential students use them to help in their choice and make great efforts to ensure the data on which the tables are based are as advantageous as they can be. Universities at the top of the tables will say how useful they are – universities near the bottom will say they are of little importance!
There are two other official sources of information that can be used to help to judge the quality of a university or a subject within a university – the results of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) and the results of Institutional Audit by the QAA. The RAE is undertaken by the Higher Education Funding Council every few years (1992, 1996, 2001 with the next one in 2008) to judge the quality of research being undertaken in universities. Its exact methods and results are changed each time, which makes it difficult to use the information, but the results are published and can help to compare universities. In 2001 each subject discipline in each university that undertakes research in that field was graded on a seven point scale (1,2,3a,3b,4,5,5*), taking into account publications and research in the previous five years. Those graded 5 and 5* (‘five star’) are those with a strong international reputation for their research quality, while those graded 4 have strong national and international research. Those graded 1–3 have some good research areas but not with the same international profile. You can find all the 2001 RAE research ratings by looking at the
HERO website.
If you are applying to do a postgraduate programme then the quality of research in your subject at the university will be of interest to you. You will certainly believe that those universities with the best research record will have the expert academic staff to provide you with the best programme. In addition it is likely that gaining a Masters or Doctorate from a highly rated university will be seen as a better achievement. This is largely true, of course, but the RAE rating is not an assured guarantee, for a number of reasons:
• The grades are now seven years old and staff move on or retire. The results of the next RAE are due to be published in 2008, and will also use a different scoring method and rating than the 2001 RAE.
• Academic staff in a department that is strongly research-driven may spend their time doing their own research rather than teaching on programmes or supporting research students. You may be taught or supervised by a more junior member of staff or even by other research students. So, while you may be able to work alongside the world-famous professor, you need to be sure whether this is really the case.
• Research ratings do not tell you anything about teaching standards. You need to check teaching standards from examiners reports or other sources.
