Birmingham: ranked 17th
University league tables are out today. Warwick shone and neighbouring Coventry is a rising star.
Cambridge came out top of The Guardian’s overall league table of British universities with Oxford second and St Andrews third.
From the Midlands, Warwick was best (6th), improving from ninth last year, according to the results, beating Durham and Imperial. Loughborough was 11th and Coventry came a commendable 15th, up from 27th last year. It shone as the best placed ex-polytechnic ever in the listings.
Birmingham was two places below at 17th, and Nottingham was at 28th. Leicester weighed in at 32nd in the list of 119 higher education universities. Aston was one below at 33. Keele was 42nd and Nottingham Trent at 51st .
The table is based on spending per student, student/staff ratio, career prospects and student satisfaction.
Further down the list were Gloucestershire (54), De Montfort (65) and Derby(73), which fell from the top fifty in last year’s list. Ex-poly Staffordshire rolled in at 83 followed by Birmingham City University at 86.
Moving towards the cellar, Worcester came in at 103 (16 places from the bottom).
Bottom, if you wish to know, at 119 was Bucks New University.
More important is which has the most mindless claptrap taught/learnt, and which has the least mindless parrotting of “knowledge”. The fact that Cambs comes first and Ox comes second gives little cause for credibility on that front. Consider the following quotes on the matter…..
“As a Cambridge medical graduate it always saddened me to see so many able-minded people struggle through our medical course. The sheer volume of information we were expected to memorise was mind-boggling.” (Gundroo 2014)
“The medical curriculum is so overloaded with information that you just have to learn what you hear, as you hear it.” (Humphries & Bystrianyk 2013)
“I was good at exams, and so I bloody well should have been. The system was set up for people like me – thorough, plodding, uncreative, capable of taking in great mounds of received wisdom and regurgitating them, undigested, unquestioned, unprocessed in three-hour bursts of neat handwriting.” (Mangan 2014)
“The school system is now finely focussed only on exam success and the exam game has very very little to do with success in real life. In business and other parts of the real world the skills that get you on in chosen area are ones such as:
– admitting you don’t know something and going out to find it out;
– finding someone who knows more than you and working with them to create something bigger and better;
– going out on a limb, flying a few kites, taking a bit more time over the really difficult issues.
In an exam situation this is either called cheating or will ensure you fail. Life is very very rarely like an exam situation – it is surprisingly a lot more like the coursework that is being consigned by Gove and his fellow conservatives to the scrap-heap.” (Edwards 2014)
Furthermore, Birmingham Univ has a whole department training its students in implanting huge lumps of highly neurotoxic mercury in the mouths of dis-informed victims, many of whom have their lives ruined as a result. And also has the lying charlatan “professor” Allister Vale on its staff. (Proof of his charlatanism can be seen at http://dentalmerc.blogspot.co.uk/). Sadly such important details are completely overlooked by this very superficial survey.
DrChrisJones @Economist_Aston 2 hrs2 hours ago
The more students per staff member, the worse the @guardian ranking.
“The more students per staff member, the worse the @guardian ranking.”
Which is a false criterion because it isn’t a desired outcome. Like rating a football team on the number of trainers it employs, or a racing car on the amount of noise it makes. But then this survey was probably designed by “graduates”, of which need I say any more?
Yes, please do
“Yes, please do”
Oh well, ask a stupid question…..
In fact I could add more to the extent of a whole book. That book will be completed in the next month or two. Let’s just say that “graduates” and “universities” don’t come out as the greatest heroes therein.