Sixth-form students (and their parents) often use league tables to decide where they are going to apply to university. Universities have something of a love/hate relationship with league tables. On the one hand they know that the metrics used to rank universities are complex and can be affected by things that are outside of their control. But, on the other hand, a good score will be prominently displayed as a sign that they are ‘doing well’. Whatever they might think in private, all universities know they can’t afford to ignore league tables since many students use them to decide where to apply.
There are many different league tables that all use different statistics to come up with their results, which is why positions can differ so much between tables for the same university and the same course. The Good University Guide (GUG) is a popular one, perhaps because it is freely available online. It uses publicly available data on universities including the National Student Survey (NSS), the most recent Research Excellence Framework (REF) and published data on entry standards, staff-student ratios, graduate prospects among other things. Some of this data is quite out of date, with 2022 tables using data from 2013/14 since that is the latest available. The GUG then weights each category, with the NSS being given slightly more significance than other categories.
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