Professor Alan Ryan,
Warden of New College, criticised league tables in a recent opinion piece for
the Times Higher education Supplement, saying that the “problem with league
tables is that they ignore the fact that institutions are of different sizes
and have different strengths.”Ryan
told Cherwell that university league tables are “all pretty much
nonsense”, and that “apples and pears” do not belong in the same table. Writing
in THeS last week, he points out that “excellent means ‘excellent at’ and that
‘at’ matters. What are you good at? is the question to ask.”Commenting
on the suggestion by Estelle Morris, former Secretary of State for Education and
Skills, that Sunderland University was doing research of the same kind as Cambridge, Ryan writes in THES: “If it does, somebody is
wasting a lot of money in the Fens. It may
well be true that the research Sunderland does
is exactly what the people it is done for need, just as it may well be true
that their teaching is just what their students need.” He
went on to say that, “In which case, the folk in Sunderland
are excellent at what they are doing. Full stop, no league tables. Does anyone
really want a table comparing violinists and tennis players?”This
year Oxford University published its first officially
endorsed ‘Norrington Table’, ranking colleges by Finals performance. The table
had previously been compiled by a number of newspapers from undergraduate
degree results posted outside Examination Schools. The University decided to
publish its own official results “in the interests of fairness” but maintained
that such college listings were “not very significant”.When
asked his thoughts on the Norrington Table, Professor Ryan said that “from top
to bottom” there was “scarcely any gap” between Oxford colleges. A
spokesperson for the University said of league tables: “We treat them with a
certain amount of caution. There are many different ways of measuring
individual aspects of an institution’s performance, and even more ways of
bringing these together in ‘league tables.’” When asked about the University’s
use of the Norrington Table, the spokesperson stated “Ranking colleges on the
basis of degree results is not very significant, as the numbers involved per
college are small, and the results are dependent on the performance of a
particular group of students in a particular year, rather than on the college
itself.”ARCHIVE: 5th week MT 2005
New College Warden dismisses ‘nonsense’ university league tables
