St Andrews beats Oxbridge to top spot in university ratings

ST ANDREWS has topped the university rankings for the first time, as the exams chaos caused by Covid saw the dominance of Oxbridge finally ended.

Either Cambridge or Oxford university has always claimed the top spot in each year of the nearly three-decade history of the Good University Guide.

They have been toppled, however, following an academic year in which higher education faced historic upheaval due to the pandemic.

St Andrews was one of the few universities that managed to broadly sustain student satisfaction rates despite the pandemic, as it flipped its small-class teaching model to online.

The annual National Student Survey (NSS), conducted between January and April this year, found satisfaction scores for other institutions had largely “fallen off a cliff ”.

Students from Cambridge and Oxford have refused to take part in the NSS since 2016, meaning ratings for this year took the last available data and applied a sector-average revision based on the overall decline in student satisfaction since they were last involved.

St Andrews also came top in another measure used to determine the rankings, as it now admits the best-qualified students, according to the Universities and College Admissions Service (Ucas).

The university is likely to have benefited more than Oxbridge on this metric following the A-level grade inflation last summer, when students were awarded grades predicted by teachers.

Cambridge and Oxford, which traditionally offer more places than they have, in expectation not everyone will meet their grades, scrambled to find space to accommodate a significantly larger intake.

Cambridge fell from first to third while Oxford retained second place. Alastair Mccall, editor of The Times and The Sunday Times Good University Guide, said: “It is no fluke. The university has been closing in on the Oxbridge duopoly for several years, buoyed by outstanding levels of student satisfaction.”

‘It is no fluke. The university has been closing in on the Oxbridge duopoly for several years’