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Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

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Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#211

Post by afavour »

programjames wrote: post #200
afavour wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know what else you can ask for here. Perhaps a demonstration of any kind of connection between his grades and his views on Kirk? The implication in what you're saying is that an ABB student is saying bad things than a 4 A* student would never say. I'd love to see anything backing that up. There are plenty of ABB students who said nothing of that nature and I'd wager you could find 4 A* students (albeit with…

I believe you're being purposefully dense here. I get it, and probably do the same sometimes, but the connection is pretty obvious: someone gets in (allegedly) due to ideological fit instead of merit, and then becomes one of the most prominent voices for that ideology at the campus. It shows "wokism" has finally solved the reproduction crisis, and for people opposed to certain aspects (like affirmative action), that'…

But that isn’t a connection. It’s a coincidence. Where is the evidence that an Oxford with only 4 A* students would not have any such language on its campus? There is none.

If I argued that his comments were an obvious sign that Oxford needs to stop admitting people whose last name starts with A you’d rightly say I was being absurd. But basing the argument around his grades is no more valid.

“allegedly due to ideological fit” says it all. We’re just making stuff up to fit preconceived notions.

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#212

Post by programjames »

croes wrote: post #68
TMWNN wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>To get in, you need 4 A* from an independent schools, or just 3 As from state schools. Or ABB for the incoming president of the Oxford Union, the one who cheered Charlie Kirk's murder a few months after debating him in person. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/education/2025/09/oxfo... >

Where is his reaction different to Kirk‘s statement that some gun deaths are a necessary evil for the „god given right“ of the 2nd amendment? Both seem to have lost basic human empathy. Shall we ask the parents of the victims of the school shootings? BTW why is a god given right not mentioned in the bible?

Clearly you need to reread The Bible:

> To the one who is victorious and does my will to the end, I will give authority over the nations—that one 'will rule them with an iron scepter and will dash them to pieces like pottery'—just as I have received authority from my Father. (Revelation 2:26–27)

Any good Sanctuarian[^1] would know this refers to the AR-15, and Americans' right to bear arms.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_of_Iron_Ministries

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#213

Post by t_luke »

joefarish wrote: post #25

I'm not saying it's wrong but people are reacting to this as if the Times university guide is some objective truth. Regarding the potential lowering of standards for widening participation purposes, this doesn't change the fact that the entry standards for Oxford and Cambridge are still higher than LSE and St. Andrews.

All the UK university ranking systems use basically the same data — the National Student Survey (NSS) which measures students' impression of teaching quality, the Graduate Outcomes Survey (GOS) which measures employment 15 months after graduation, and a bunch of standard data collected by HESA — entry standards, whether students complete their degrees, average degree classifications, etc.

Much of this data is extremely 'gameable', and a lot of the 'alpha' between successful and less successful institutions is being 'good at surveys.' e.g. for NSS, between comparable institutions it's really a question of how good they are at getting students to complete the survey (students mostly ignore it, and you lose marks for poor completion rates).

Of course — it should also go without saying that there is no 'correct' weighting for any of this data, and depending on how you weight the different indicators, the rankings change.

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#214

Post by andmikey »

owlbite wrote: post #159

So my experience with moving from a Cambridge undergrad to an Edinburgh postgrad, albeit a couple of decades ago now, was the expectations between the two were nowhere comparable. Cambridge if you'd not done the homework before the tutorial, you got sent packing for wasting everyone's time, but in Edinburgh it was common for all but the best students to only start the homework at the tutorial (thus wasting their oppo…

This was also my observation but in the reverse direction. I turned down a place at Cambridge to do my undergrad at Edinburgh a few years ago (for various reasons, not relevant here). It was only the top n% of students in the cohort who'd turn up for tutorials (prepared, or indeed at all), do assignments without cheating, ask questions in lectures, etc. Getting high grades in exams was mostly a memorization game. There was a really high workload but that was more due to busywork than intellectual challenge.

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#215

Post by ceejayoz »

rayiner wrote: post #161
ceejayoz wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only 1 in 2600 gets 4 A. > And 1 in 83 gets 3 As. And what if that’s not always an indication of which person is smarter ?

But we know that it’s true. That’s why we have been using objective metrics like test scores for millennia, across societies are different as China, India, and Britain.

We’ve done all sorts of dumb things for thousands of years.

It’s one metric of many. We know that paying for a tutor can change test scores. We know that a shitty home life can, too. They’re just harder to measure.

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#216

Post by odyssey7 »

ralph84 wrote: post #198
growse wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The very top aren't applying there any more at all, you don't need to: Stanford, Harvard, MIT, all better. The only people applying to those from the UK are the wealthy. If by "very top" you mean "richest", then maybe. But I'm not sure we care about that?

The network value of knowing a rich person far exceeds the network value of knowing a smart person.

How are we valuing the network? There are doors that many wealthy people would not be able to open and vice-versa. On the other hand, someone both smart and wealthy... Sam Altman comes to mind, as well as a number of other figures of historic importance.

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#217

Post by exe34 »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #202
exe34 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The supervision system guarantees all Oxbridge students weekly, small-group tutorials, We had that in Physics at Manchester in the 2000s. 4 students. I'm guessing they got the idea from Oxbridge, but I don't think it's been a USP for a very long time.

That sounds like a similar idea but I doubt it's to the same extent. When I was at Cambridge in the early noughties, supervisions for maths and computer science (and physics I believe but I didn't go to any of those) were 2 students in 4 1-hour sessions per week (1 per 24 hour lecture course). [Edit: hmm, actually maybe it was just 2 per week.] In maths, if there were an odd number of students then one would get 1 to…

cue the Harvard graduates tell us they had 5 teachers for 1 student in their tutorials.

A large part of uni is about learning to learn on your own and learning in groups - if everything is spoonfed, it might not be the best training.

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#218

Post by WrongAssumption »

curiousgal wrote: post #49
fillskills wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While your link is helpful, he did not say that. He specifically mentions changing the admissions standards. Specifically having different standards for different social classes. I have second handedly seen the effects of such discrimination in other societies and it really is crippling to the economy. Be wary of any kind of discrimination specifically one that lowers expected grades.

> Now they have lower standards for applicants from poor families or bad schools. As a result Oxford and Cambridge have sunk to fourth place in the latest Times Good Universities Guide. He did say exactly that.

Your link bolsters the point of the person you are responding to. The lowering of standards is the relevant portion. It would be relevant if they lowered standards for any group, just happened they lowered them for poor families.

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#219

Post by rayiner »

Latty wrote: post #182
rayiner wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we know that it’s true. That’s why we have been using objective metrics like test scores for millennia, across societies are different as China, India, and Britain.

Your best argument is "we've done it for a long time, so it can't be wrong"? Quite the contrary: there is a long history of "objective" tests being shown to be deeply flawed and biased towards certain factors (often cultural and class based), we explicitly know it isn't the case that test scores are purely about some innate intelligence characteristic: there is a reason the rich spend a lot of money to raise their ch…

The notion that the British A levels have “cultural bias” is absurd, given that Asians outperform white British: https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/education....

In the U.S., research shows the SAT is highly predictive of college performance: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-week-educatio... (summarizing research).

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#220

Post by rcxdude »

patanegra wrote: post #5
abxyz wrote: post #2

pg thinks this is because of letting in poor people: https://xcancel.com/paulg/status/1969334665375813679

This is extremely unfair framing. Oxford University has been discriminating people from independent schools for a while now. To get in, you need 4 A* from an independent schools, or just 3 As from state schools. That's not "letting in poor people" as you framed it. It's letting in dumber people, worse students. Lots of that is mainly based on classism (against people from middle class), racism (against white people).…

Keep in mind that the rating here is mostly about the student's opinion of the university, especially in terms of the teaching. And a dirty little secret of oxbridge I feel is that the teaching isn't particularly great. It's not bad, to be clear, and supervisions are something that you don't really get elsewhere, but it's very much a 'chuck people into the very deep end and let them sink-or-swim' approach with the sheer amount of material that they expect you to get through in a pretty short amount of time. The reputation they have is because a) they can afford to be (and are fairly good at) being highly selective in admitting those who can cope with this, b) if you do manage to swim, you've shown a higher level of aptitude for the subject than other universities, and c) because of said selectivity, you'll tend to be around other students who are able to support you. The actual level of support and teaching from the university itself is not as top-class.
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