<p>Forgot about Durham and Bath.</p>
<p>sorry but that top 10 is wrong. KCL and Edinburgh arent that amazing. KCL is only top (or atleast percieved to be) for Medicine and Law. i cant think of anything about Edinburgh. the general consensus is:</p>
<p>Oxford/Cambridge
LSE/Imperial
Warwick/UCL
Nottingham/Bristol
Durham/Bath/York/Edinburgh
Manchester/St.Andrews/KCL/SOAS. </p>
<p>position in a tier is by my memorey alone...so it doesnt really matter which one you go to in your tier unless one is vastly better than the other at something (eg SOAS is v.good at Japanese etc).</p>
<p>and UCL > Bristol >>>>>>>>>>> York.</p>
<p>If you're interested in general university rankings, check out the following:</p>
<p>The Times and the Sunday Times provide some of the best, methodologically speaking, rankings available. The universities that make both of their top ten are listed below:</p>
<p>Oxford
Cambridge
LSE
Imperial
UCL
St Andrews
Warwick
York
Bristol</p>
<p>I don't know how valuable it is to offer rankings from memory when the actual statistics are easily obtained. Further, breaking the top ten down into five or more tiers seems to be a bit pedantic, if not misleading.</p>
<p>first of all stop giving people misleading tables. i can only think of one or two subjects for both York and St.Andrews where they are better than average. stop misleading people. going to St.Andrews/York over Warwick/Nottingham/Bristol/Durham would be a big mistake (unless all you care about is where u spend ur 3 years rather than the end product). and how is my "table" misleading?</p>
<p>are you honestly saying that LSE is better than Imperial? now im a Social Science student and would therefore be anti Imperial, but i know that it doesnt offer the same subjects that LSE does (although LSE does offer Maths + Econ and BMS which is slightly similar). hence putting one over the over is ridiculous. They are both widly regarded as the next best thing after Oxbridge for nearly all subjects and hence go into their own 2nd tier. Oxford for example, also come first in only 6 or so out of over 35 subjects surveyed (Cambs wins nearly all of the rest) so why is it first on your list? again you are misleading people.
lets go further about my table..UCL/Warwick...these are widly seen for most subjects as being the next step down...i honestly cant think of a subject where these two excel over the previous 4 mentioned...now some might argue that UCL is better but in the end, their argument boils down to location, which is a ridiculous thing to base which Uni is better and hence is irrelivent. next come Bristol and nottingham...virtually equal in standings with Bristol being more popular due to its Oxbridge-reject/ancient theme etc amongst public school boys. on the next level you have Unis like Bath, York, Durham etc where i would be suprised if you made a conclusion that one is better than the other overall. so again...the concept of rigid tables such as the ones you presented are outdated.</p>
<p>and btw heres an uptodate subject league table if you are so desperate. stop using the 2006 PCW sponsered one..its rubbish, full of errors..</p>
<p>I apologize if my post was worded a bit too harshly. A few points:</p>
<p>My list of universities indicates those that appear on both top ten lists. No rank or order is implied, though it does tend to be more inline with the Times Good University Guide rankings.</p>
<p>Both York and St Andrews have pretty consistently made the top ten, out of over 120 universities, over the past five years. I think viewing them as just "better than average" might be a bit skewed. That's just my opinion.</p>
<p>The quantitative differences between St Andrews, York, Warwick, Bristol, and Durham are negligible. For example, in the Sunday Times ranking these universities have a spread of only 24 out of 1000 possible points. This near equality would lead one to decide based on location, environment, mission, tradition, etc. Nottingham doesn't often break the top ten threshold, but it's still a great university. </p>
<p>I would argue that one should be concerned with "where u spend ur 3 years" because "the end product" is determined by far more than some magazine ranking. Universities develop their unique cultures for reasons and students are attracted to institutions that inspire them. These qualities may not be very well reflected in rankings, other than through the student satisfaction assessment. As an aside, St Andrews has the highest student satisfaction in the United Kingdom, according to the Sunday Times. </p>
<p>I don't favor rigid tables and never offered one of my own. I do think that the subject rankings you provided are a bit more informative, but still don't explain much. Further, I have no problem with attempting to break down the top tier, but in my opinion your table is misleading because it places too many artificial barriers that imply a significant difference in quality. The value of a tier is diminished if it only contains a couple of universities; when universities spread across three tiers have only minor differences, one questions the construct.</p>
<p>A better approach may be to identify two sub-tiers within the top ten. For example, this is based on the Sunday Times top ten:</p>
<p>Tier 1.1: Cambridge, Oxford, LSE, Imperial, UCL
Tier 1.2: Warwick, York, Durham, Bristol, St Andrews</p>
<p>This too has to be taken with a grain of salt because for some subjects, like York with computer science and St Andrews for international relations, universities in Tier 1.2 surpass those listed in Tier 1.1.</p>