Some good news today from the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise. The full details of the procedure and the results are available here and there is a handy pdf of the headline news from the THE here. But here are the rankings for the subjects I'm most interested in. The results here show a weighted average score (from 0 to 4) for a given assessment unit (subject) by institution. Very good news for the Cambridge Faculty of Classics. The Cambridge ancient philosophers were included in the Classics submission since that is where we hold our lectureships.
Here is the GPA ranking for Classsics, ancient history, Byzantine and modern Greek studies:
Cambridge 3.15
UCL 2.95
King’s College 2.85
Here is the ranking for Philosophy.
Good news for the Cambridge Department of the History and Philosophy of Science.
UCL 3.15
King’s College 3.05
LSE 2.95
Birkbeck 2.85
2 comments:
Still a bit misleading, you know. You make it sound as if there is just one official ranking, which you've done by the score called GPA which is an average across all the research activities. But the whole point was to give a nuanced profile, not a single score to a department, and if you rank it by the quantity of so-called "world leading research" (e.g. quantity at grade 4*) you get a different rank order, and so on with other ways of ranking. There are in fact no official rankings, because each place has a profile, and there's no simple way of saying that one profile is better than another... Obviously the ones with higher scores across the board are better than the ones with lower scores across the board, but how you fill in the middle is quite unclear.
The links to the THE and the RAE website give the full information.
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