Saw it saw it!!!!!!!!!

Check out the Guardian - they have calculated average rankings which makes it a bit easier to judge who did well.

Overall, Cambridge did best, followed by Oxford, LSE, Imperial, UCL. No changes in my subject....Oxford and Cambridge lead, with the London colleges and red-bricks following.

I didn't know there would be an 'unclassified' section...OUCH! I guess that's where the heads will roll.

Oooooh saw it and am very pleased!!!! 8-)(up) Fortunately nobody in my dept ended up unclassified - ouch that's gotta hurt - I agree that I'd imagine that's where the heads roll surely. I wonder though how they classify national importance as opposed to international as opposed to world leading - that's gotta give a buzz hasn't it - I'd be intrigued to know which of my lecturers and profs got that one :-)

Intrigued that my department scored higher than Cambridge or the Courtauld Institute. The staff must have really been under pressure to publish by the school/ university over the past few years!

Ha haaaaaa! my super ace, ace undergraduate department got 60% for 4*, 10 higher than the Courtauld - I always knew they were better! and Oxbridge la de da de daaaaaaaa and my rubish ex PhD department I've just left got......... 0!!!!!!!!. Yes, zero at 4*, even though they're red brick. No wonder they were edgy.

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glad to see my uni did pretty well overall and my department was 2nd with 30% 4*. however, i was just wondering something - has anyone worked out a ranking based on the number of subjects each uni covers? for example, oxford and cambridge each do 48, whereas LSE only does 14, so you would expect LSE to do well as it is so specialised. therefore wouldn't it be of interest to do a ranking weighted somehow to reflect this? forgive me if this sounds like a load of rubbish, stats were never my strong point! ;-)

Here is an adjusted rankings table which combines the RAE grade with the number of staff assessed (I assume it will give a better indication of who actually gets the research money):

http://www.researchresearch.com/getPage.cfm?pagename=RAE2008-Power&lang=EN&type=default

thanks, that's the sort of thing i was after! especially as it means my uni moves up the rankings ;-)

I don't know how accurate that table in the link is, for example the THES says that Cambridge was ranked 1st overall in 2001, but that link says it was 2nd in 2001. Also, according to THES Oxford had a lower score and more staff submitted, but comes out with a better weighted average? I'm not too hot on statistics, then of course who's to say that THES is right.

Oh, I don't like that table - we're in the top 10 in the other one and way down in this revised one - nope, don't like it at all - I'll stick to the guardian lol!

We did worse than last time and have had various different accounts of how we apparently did. It's been quite interesting trying to work out how people got those interpretations. We've come to the conclusion that you can be your own spin doctor and make even fairly dodgy results seem surprisingly positive if you juggle them around in enough variations. It's really weird after all that time and angst that no-one knows how badly/well we actually did. Maybe tomorrow we'll get another version...

We did spectacularly well, and are so very hiiiigh up in the table, just a weeny bit behind cambridge!!!! Our dept did brilliantly and we celebrated with champagne. plus it was graduation too, and 2 of our PhDs got lovely jobs, even before they've submitted their thesis, so our teachers and we phds were beaming from ear to ear!

Well, the consensus for our department seems to be that it wasn't terrible, but not as good as thought or expected... 20% 4*, very big redbrick humanities department.

Ours has bombed big style! Still in the top 10 for European Studies, but 5% 4*, cleverly balanced out by 5% unclassified... dreading that board meeting on Monday now! Well, at least it wasn't me bringing the place down!

I think we have to take all the tables with a pinch of salt as they all come out with different rankings even based on the raw RAE data. The Times and The Guardian always have an agenda, so I never really take much notice of them. The table below is so different because it looks not only a quality but quantity too. I'm not sure if the THES does an adjusted table.

The Research Fortnight's table is apparently the 'most respected' data according to The Independent, who also use the same data to put LSE actually ahead of Oxbridge.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/lse-beats-oxford-and-cambridge-to-become-best-research-centre-1202324.html
With the exception of LSE (due to its small size), the table also seems to preserve the Russell Group hierarchy.


Of course, the whole RAE thing has been scrapped now because it's so crap, but what is replacing it?