London Metropolitan University???.. Can i have your views please

Personally I'd stay well away...

Well the one hard fact I can give you is that they have refused to participate in many of the previous Times Good University Guide Rankings. In fact they haven't allowed themselves to be ranked for the past 3 years, I don't know before then.

Its up to you what you surmise from that! Personally the way I would look at it is that if London Met suits you then go there. University is what you make of it! Not so relevant to the potential Masters chap with oodles of experience but to a young' un with little experience, maximise your experience! If you leave with just a degree and thats it, well I don't fancy your chances; however if you leave having done Officer Training Corps, had positions in the SU, got relevant work experience etc. then should make up in some part any deficiencies in the reputation of the university you go to! To use a cliché, an employer hires you, the individual, not the University.

ok so this thread has been up since 2005, then some more comments from 2008 and now it's 2014, so wow, almost 10 years have passed!

i started at the met september 2013 doing a foundation year in sciences and will be progressing onto an accredited Bio-Med course next year and i love it here. you can imagine that it has changed a fair amount over 10 years - i couldnt speak for what it used to be like. i know it had problems in the past. as people have mentioned before (and will continue to in every "is this uni any good?" debate) it depends on the course.

i wouldn't want to be doing a history or creative writing degree at the met because that's the kind of thing i'd want to be taught at a uni with a certain amount of prestige by a lecturer with a bibliography under their belt. however, as has already been said, the arts and design courses have a very good reputation. in my case, it's also a good place to study sciences. they have a huge new lab which means getting lab time is easy (a common problem for science students at uni), the teachers are really good at explaining things - actually better than at other places because of the variety of students they have to cater for - and are energetic, making the subjects easy to learn (a few exceptions aside, my nutrition teacher could sometimes do with an extra cup of coffee!)

the met gets a lot of flack because they have low entry requirements. personally i think they actually work harder to get the most out their students than a prestigious university who simply relies on the fact that they are competitive. falling behind? well suck it up mate, we've got 1000 kids queuing up round the corner wanting your place sooo... the met actually puts on a lot of extra support for people which i think is great, especially for the people that they are catering for (a lot of international students, students returning to education like myself)

there are a few drawbacks, but there are at any uni. i would say some people really care a lot about prestige. at the met, you are not going to get to study in some elizabethan chapel, neither are you going to be taught by celebrities. pedigree aside, i might say is that yeah, it's true that if you don't do so well and come out of the met with a 2.2 or a 3rd then your degree isn't worth much, however, if you do very well and get a 1st, it may be considered particularly good to have done so well at what is still considered a "troubled" uni (reputations take a long time to change). of course, everyone should be aiming for the best they can! the teaching is good and when friends of mine visit me here who have gone to other uni's (queen mary's, south bank, UWE) they say it seems good to them. apparently the student bar is good by other standards (i can't really compare). you know, a swimming pool and a boxing ring in the gym would be nice too, but what you gonna do, hey?

the only other thing i would say i find the most disadvantaging is that because the met takes a huge range of people, it is easy to get annoyed by people who don't take their work as seriously as you. there are some kids who are just trying to pass the next module and would rather hang around in the bar and play pool and fifa. this may well be the case at most universities though. however, it might add to the "bad reputation". some people don't seem to care too much. of course, these are the ones who eventually drop out or fail. personally, however, i find it snobbish to act as if it means the university is a bad university just because they have open doors!

one final thing is that even people at the met form their opinions about it from what people say about it. it's a shame because it's so ill informed to speak before having experienced other unis. i spoke to someone at the met who used to go to kings but moved to the met because they said kings didn't care about them at all. a lot of people on the foundations year i'm doing want to get their 70% mark (something of a threshold for being accepted at other unis) and then go somewhere else, but i can't help but think that unless they are very lucky, it won't be any better than where they are now, per se. i am staying at the met because i have settled in here and it gives me everything i need. i would also add that i am averaging a 90% score at the moment so something is going right for sure. the met is not perfect, but i would recommend it.

from original post - "i started at the met september 2013 doing a foundation year in sciences and will be progressing onto an accredited Bio-Med course next year"

;-)

London Met is bottom of the bottom

^I think their entry requirements are extremely low.