Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

hotminute.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 446 posts

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#231

Post by michaelt »

jfengel wrote: post #128
madaxe_again wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Durham is the oxbridge reject university, and it’s a standard opener during freshers week to ask which college rejected them. Me, Corpus Christi Oxford reject, Durham alumnus. What has seemingly happened here is that oxbridge have ramped up their intake of overseas students, who pay a vast sum compared to a U.K. student, thus pushing more U.K. talent to Durham, as you’ll always preferentially give the place to the ki…

I assumed one generally applied to both, no?

As I understand it, you can't apply to Oxford and Cambridge in the same year.

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#232

Post by growse »

rayiner wrote: post #222
growse wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got six A's at A level, over 20 years ago. Am i objectively smarter than every single other peer who only got 4 As? (I, for one, am confident I know the answer to this question).

Close. If you take a group of 50 people like you, who got six A’s, and a group of 50 people who only got 4 A’s, then the former group will be smarter.

So people who've been taught more things are "smarter" than people who've not been taught as much?

All babies are stupid, I therefore assume?

What about the people who never get the chance to do any A levels? Are they all less smart than those who do?

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#233

Post by 2b3a51 »

ccppurcell wrote: post #171

Rankings are just meaningless. And this isn't the evidence for it! Actually in the past they've more or less admitted that they play around with the weighting and discard if the outcome is unexpected, meaning that even by its own standards it's circular. But the fact is that rankings are one dimensional and universities are very obviously multidimensional. You can't get anything meaningful out of such compression. Th…

David Spiegelhalter has had a lot to say about rankings over the years. The paper below contains concrete examples in the educational sphere and in the medical sphere, mostly UK based. TD,LR: confidence interval(s) in the measures that you are ranking on.

https://www.bristol.ac.uk/media-library/sites/cmm/migrated/d...

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#234

Post by drillbit »

About ten years ago I went to Oxford to study as a postgraduate. The quality of the research I was supposed to be conducting was very, very poor, and I consider some of the practices I witnessed to be borderline fraudulent. It was quite a shock. (I eventually dropped out and studied at a non-famous university—which had its own problems but at least the research was sound.)

It's frankly heartening to see it drop down the rankings, although IMO generally too much emphasis is placed on these sorts of lists.

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#235

Post by programjames »

jansan wrote: post #33

I compared this to the QS ranking, where Oxford is still second in the world, and Durham, the new third place in the ranking mentioned in the article is 341. QS ranking does not even rank the first two, London School of Economics and University of St. Andrews. Does anybody know why? Edit: Sorry, I only looked at the Engineering ans Technology ranking. Anyway, QS ranking is vastly different from the Times' ranking.

Why does MIT get a 91.6/100 for the "International Student Ratio" while Peking University gets 37.3/100, when they have nearly identical undergraduate ratios? EDIT: Ah, it also includes graduate students.

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#236

Post by growse »

patanegra wrote: post #207
growse wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's letting in dumber people, worse students It's a very bold assertion that A level grades are the ultimate arbiter of "dumbness".

When you compare 1:83 vs 1:2600, it is so big difference, it deserves bold statements. In the UK, there's 1.5 million kids playing footbal. 1:83 ~18000 kids play in any professional club. 1:2600 ~580 kids get to play in Premier League, EFL Championship in a season What is Oxford doing is letting kids who play in absolutely any club, if they go to state school, or only those who got to Premier League, if they go to in…

Why do you think the school & A level system is perfectly meritocratic when the evidence squarely suggests it's far from it?

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#237

Post by rcxdude »

patanegra wrote: post #207
growse wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's letting in dumber people, worse students It's a very bold assertion that A level grades are the ultimate arbiter of "dumbness".

When you compare 1:83 vs 1:2600, it is so big difference, it deserves bold statements. In the UK, there's 1.5 million kids playing footbal. 1:83 ~18000 kids play in any professional club. 1:2600 ~580 kids get to play in Premier League, EFL Championship in a season What is Oxford doing is letting kids who play in absolutely any club, if they go to state school, or only those who got to Premier League, if they go to in…

And yet students at independent schools are twice as likely to get all As than those at state schools. Do you think it's likely that all the smart students happen to have the means to go to the independent schools? Keep in mind the grades are not the main filter for oxbridge: probably the largest is whether the students apply in the first place, and then the latter is the interview, which matters a lot for determining which people with good enough grades are actually good enough to get in.

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#238

Post by varispeed »

Sadly most UK universities are just visa mills and status symbols for overseas parents. This means they do token teaching and locals actually wanting to learn something are left with little. Lecturers literally tell you to just use YouTube or Udemy to understand subject matter while themselves barely speak English and presumably get their presentations done of Fiverr. Complaints get dismissed because they want to maintain facade and students themselves won't speak up, because it would mean the degree parents paid for is not worth the paper it is written on. If you plan to study in the UK, do your research and be careful.

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#239

Post by varispeed »

skippyboxedhero wrote: post #196
cs02rm0 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did international student income drop with Brexit, when the UK now have 4-600k student visas granted in each of the last few years vs 2-300k pre-Brexit?

Because universities borrowed staggering amounts of money and hired massive numbers of people. The assumption was that international student numbers would be allowed to grow as fast or faster than in the past, ignoring the fact that the UK is not able to provide infrastructure for the people who live here let alone temporary inhabitants. There is no way to keep the bubble going (as with every bubble, for government a…

Don't forget that the Universities focused on getting foreign students and cashing in instead of providing valuable education.

The quality of teaching is non-existent. It's about giving foreign parents ability to tell their peers look my brilliant child is studying in England! But really they are not studying. Attendance is not checked and lectures are a sham.

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#240

Post by rcxdude »

growse wrote: post #23
abxyz wrote: post #2

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

> Kids worrying that Oxford and Cambridge will discriminate against them are among the smartest in the country. pg's lack of awareness that this has basically always been true smacks of naiveté.

To add to this: Oxford and Cambridge always get the smartest in the country, and they don't struggle to identify them. From what I know of the admissions process, there's three fairly obvious groups of applicants to oxbridge: people who are obviously ludicrously smart and driven and will not struggle at all with the course, who are obvious accepts but are not nearly enough to fill a year group; those who are obviously not cut out for it and are rejected outright, and those who are probably going to be OK but it's not a slam-dunk. The main challenge for them is picking those with the best chances out of the third group.
Post reply on HN