How We Rank Universities (No Nonsense)

Choosing a university is a big deal. You're investing 3+ years of your life and probably £40k+ in tuition and living costs. So you’d think university rankings would be designed for you, the student… but they’re not.

The Guardian League Table, for example, gives 15% of the score to entry requirements (which can be misleading), 15% to staff-to-student ratios (which tell you nothing about actual class sizes), and just 10% to student satisfaction — arguably the one thing a university can control!

Let’s break that down:

• Entry requirements: Some universities publish higher offers than they actually accept. Some bizarre data/facts – read more here.
• Staff:student ratio: When you see "1:20" it doesn't suggest you'll have lectures with another 120 plus students.
• Expenditure per student: This includes research and central university costs — not just teaching or your department.
• Career prospects: A uni might take credit for students who got jobs through their own hustle.
• Student satisfaction: Gets the smallest weighting… when it should probably be the biggest.

So we flipped it. What if universities were ranked by the people who actually experienced them — the final year students?

Enter the National Student Survey (NSS)

Every year, over 340,000 final year students in the UK are asked 28 questions about their university experience. It covers:

• Teaching quality
• Learning opportunities
• Assessment and feedback
• Academic support
• Organisation and management
• Learning resources
• Student voice
• Mental wellbeing services

That’s basically everything you’d want to know. How helpful are lecturers? Is feedback useful? Are you actually supported? Is the place well run?

But here’s the thing: this data is public, but it’s messy. That’s where UniversityRanking.co.uk steps in.

How Our Rankings Work

We take the 26 questions that apply to all UK universities (Q27 and Q28 are specific to certain nations, so we exclude them for fairness).

One important note: The NSS changed some of its questions in 2023, which makes year-on-year comparisons tricky. To keep things fair, we only included 2023 questions that have a clear counterpart in 2022 — ones that ask essentially the same thing, even if the wording is slightly different. That way, when we average across years, we're comparing like with like.

Want to see exactly how we matched the questions? Check out the full breakdown.

Each question counts equally — that’s 1/26th of the total score. Then we average the results across the past two years (e.g. 2025 and 2024) so no uni gets a fluke result.

In total, we’re looking at feedback from around 640,000 students.

Want More Control?

Use our Customiser tool to change how much each question matters to you. Want to give extra weight to mental health support? Go for it. Think assessment feedback is crucial? Boost it.

You’re in control of what matters in your ranking.

A Final Note

Universities do encourage students to complete the NSS, often offering freebies or incentives. Why? Because satisfied students can balance out negative reviews. That’s the game. We just show you the results — no spin, no PR, just the data.

Welcome to University Ranking. Real students. Real rankings.