The Student Room Group

The Guardian's Postgraduate Tables

Has anyone else had a look at the Guardian's tables of "every postgraduate course at each university in the UK"?

It's quite good fun to try and spot just how many courses and institutions they've completely missed out (for instance, judging by the tables London University is the only group of institutions to offer postgraduate courses in American Studies. There's quite a substantial number of omissions from the maths table as well).
Reply 1
MrShifty
Has anyone else had a look at the Guardian's tables of "every postgraduate course at each university in the UK"?

It's quite good fun to try and spot just how many courses and institutions they've completely missed out (for instance, judging by the tables London University is the only group of institutions to offer postgraduate courses in American Studies. There's quite a substantial number of omissions from the maths table as well).

Yes, they're quite amusing. Cambridge will be surprised to hear they don't have an English department...:tongue:

Other than that, I was relieved to see they didn't actually attempt to rank courses, which would have been quite idiotic, so it really is just a table where you can compare information at a glance, i.e. a tool which saves you a bit of work (which I think is far more useful than a table which tells you Course A at university X is "best"). "Expenditure per student (out of 10)" still seems like a bit of a dodgy category to me, but at least it's reasonably well explained in the methodology bit, so fair enough. I'm also glad they seem to have left out the "job prospects" announced on the title page, although I'm sure people will complain about this.

So my overall verdict is that this could have been a lot worse.
MrShifty
Has anyone else had a look at the Guardian's tables of "every postgraduate course at each university in the UK"?

It's quite good fun to try and spot just how many courses and institutions they've completely missed out (for instance, judging by the tables London University is the only group of institutions to offer postgraduate courses in American Studies. There's quite a substantial number of omissions from the maths table as well).

their chemistry table seems a bit lacking
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/table/2009/feb/17/postgraduate-masters-tables-chemistry
Revolution is my Name


no expert but chem depts are disappearing and maybe they are the only ones who do pg courses.
Reply 4
flexiblefish
no expert but chem depts are disappearing and maybe they are the only ones who do pg courses.


That's exactly the problem with the tables. Oxford and Manchester offer chemistry masters by research, for instance, and Birbeck offers an MSc in analytical chemistry. Similarly the maths table misses out a number of universities such as Queen Mary, Bath, Durham, and UEA which all offer a masters in mathematics in one form or another yet includes the LSE which offers only an MSc in financial mathematics (but omits Imperial, Leeds, and a whole host of other institutions that also run such a course).

In principle it could, as Hobnob writes, be a handy tool, but in a lot of cases the tables are so incomplete (with the inclusion of some institutions and not others verging on being arbitrary) as to render them useless.
Reply 5
It is so wrong, just like everything written in the Guardian
Reply 6
poossum
It is so wrong, just like everything written in the Guardian

What's "wrong" about it, other than it has apparently omitted quite a few departments (which can be easily fixed)?:confused:
Apparently Cambridge doesn't have a Geography department. News to me!
Nor does Cambridge appear to have a history faculty...

Anyways, it is interesting. Better than slogging through dozens of websites looking for postgraduate numbers, staff complements and international student numbers. The fee levels look to be mostly in order, but there are a couple which are significantly off.
Reply 9
Durham doesn't have geography, cool, or Bristol. Good to see that the two best human geog research depts don't feature :cool:. It could be something to do with the fact that Env studies is a different dept. to Geography at Durham, but I'm not sure.
They've got to have submitted data to get included, many places don't. Also they are limited to master's degrees and so in subjects like chemistry it is probably just not worth the effort to get a submission together for the small handful of master's students you have as part of your postgraduate community.
Reply 11
The course I've applied to doesn't exist.
Oh well.
Reply 12
ChemistBoy
They've got to have submitted data to get included, many places don't.


Fair enough, but it's a bit much to advertise it as a complete list of all master's courses at every university.
Reply 13
Ever since the Guardian started ranking departments that didn't exist (Bangor and Hull being high in 08 tables despite their maths depts closing three years previously) has meant anything they try to do immediately lacks credibility. Submissions or no submissions, Cambridge has one of the largest history postgrad communities in the UK- for them to be missing from any table/comparison tool is automatically giving it too many holes to be reliable.