UK university undergraduate programs are compared by independent subject-specific rankings (Complete, Guardian, and Times), based on data from the National Student Survey, Higher Education Statistics Agency, Universities and Colleges Admissions Service, Research Excellence Framework, and the universities. The sports and exercise science program at…

Media outlets often produce higher education rankings. These media platforms are largely financed, via advertising, by the higher education institutions they also rank. This paper investigates the relationship between university advertising in the Times Higher Education magazine and their place in the ranking published in the same magazine. Using…

Arbitrary placing cut-offs in data, i.e. binning, is recognised as poor statistical practice. We explore the consequences of using arbitrary cut-offs in two large datasets, the National Student Survey (2019 and 2022). These are nationwide surveys aimed at capturing student satisfaction amongst UK undergraduates. For these survey data, it is common…

Positioning strategy and ranking are critical issues in an increasingly competitive higher education landscape. Unless there is conceptual congruence between positioning strategies and rankings, the signals may become diffused and confusing for prospective students. This paper seeks the congruence between positioning strategies and ranking. Since…

Standardisation is a procedure used by Awarding Organisations to maximise marking reliability, by teaching examiners to consistently judge scripts using a mark scheme. However, research shows that people are better at comparing two objects than judging each object individually. Consequently, Oxford, Cambridge and RSA (OCR, a UK awarding…

Globalizing forces have both transformed the higher education sector and made it increasingly homogenous. Growing similarities among universities have been attributed to isomorphic pressures to ensure and/or enhance legitimacy by imitating higher education institutions that are perceived as successful internationally, particularly universities…

This article analyzes the People's Republic of China's elite-making higher education policies that began in the early 1990s, notably with the 211 Project and then 985 Project, which led to the formation of the C9 League, a group of nine leading institution's dubbed China's "Ivy League." This elite grouping is compared with other Chinese…

This essay explores and examines how rankings and league tables have played (and continue to play) a major and consequential role in how contemporary business schools manage their affairs. It introduces and advances the proposition that rankings promote the short-term manipulation of public reputation (image) projected by business schools at the…

University league tables give the image that there is a single dimension along which institutions can be placed. Most derive rankings from an aggregate score of multiple items, which often include opinion responses which has the potential to introduce sampling bias. This paper explores what happens when the two issues of dimensionality and…

The objectives of this article are to critically analyse the impact of formative and summative assessment in an informal secondary school environment. The informality reflects the work of The Anne Frank Trust UK and their practices in evaluating student progress through a two-week workshop programme. The preference for formative assessment is…

This research tests whether Holderness Jr., D. K., Myers, N., Summers, S. L., & Wood, D. A. [(2014). "Accounting education research: Ranking institutions and individual scholars." "Issues in Accounting Education," 29(1), 87-115] accounting-education rankings are sensitive to a change in the set of journals used. It provides…

Institutions are understandably interested in the profile of their own reputations based upon publicly available data about student experiences. The UK's National Student Survey (NSS) metrics are integrated into several "Good University" calculations, whereas teaching teams most often use the survey's text comments to change practices,…

Despite claims made for them, many current education policies have perverse consequences. If all our children are to benefit from the good education they deserve, we need: forms of accountability that do not rely on school performance tables of test results; a focus on standards that embody high expectations for all; the urgent creation of a…

The Government is committed to introducing a Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) to assess the quality of teaching and learning in higher education. Designing the right solution is challenging. There is no off-the-shelf solution from other countries that we can lift. But we can learn lessons from other sectors. This pamphlet explores rating…

Schooling can produce both cognitive and non-cognitive skills, both of which are important determinants of adult outcomes. Using very rich data from a UK birth cohort study, I estimate teacher value added (VA) models for both pupils' test scores and non-cognitive skills. I show that teachers are equally important in the determination of pupils'…