The data
We use the Discover Uni dataset (September 2026), which HESA publishes under the CC BY 4.0 licence. It holds course-level results from the National Student Survey, the Graduate Outcomes survey and university records. We only include full-time first degrees.
Matching courses to subjects
Each course is tagged with official subject codes (the Common Aggregation Hierarchy). A course counts towards a subject if it carries that subject’s code. Where a university has single-subject degrees we use those; joint degrees only count for universities with no single-subject option.
The five measures and their weights
- Student satisfaction25%
- Graduate-level jobs25%
- Salary after 15 months20%
- Stay on course15%
- Entry points (median)15%
Entry points carry the least weight because they show who gets in, not how good the course is.
How the grade check works
When we have the university’s typical offer (or our estimate of it), we compare your best three A-level grades with that offer. You’ll see Meets the offer, Meets the lower offer (where the offer is a range), One grade below or Below the offer. Estimated offers get the same labels with the word “estimate”.
When there’s no offer to compare with, we turn your grades into UCAS points and compare them with the points of students who actually started the course. Their totals include every qualification they had, such as a fourth A-level, an EPQ or AS levels, so they usually sit above the published offer. Someone who exactly meets the offer at a selective university often has more points than only 10–30% of starters.
So those labels are set with that in mind: Comfortable means you have more points than at least half of starters, Good match at least 10%, Stretch 3–9% and Long shot under 3%. It’s a guide to how competitive a course is, not a prediction of an offer. Always check the entry requirements on the university’s own course page.
Typical offers and estimated offers
Typical offers come from each university’s own course pages, which we check once a year. Some universities block automated checks or show their requirements in a way we can’t read, so for those we show an estimated offer, always marked with ~ and the word “estimate”.
To estimate, we use the thousands of courses where we know both the published A-level offer and the grades of students who actually started. For a course without a published offer, we look at courses whose students had similar grades and show the range covering the middle half of their offers. It’s right to within one grade about 84% of the time when we test it on courses where we do know the offer. We don’t estimate for Scottish universities, because their students mostly have Highers and the pattern doesn’t hold. An estimate is a guide only: always check the real offer on the course page.
Calculating the score
For each measure we see how far each university sits above or below the average for that subject (a standard score). Before scoring, results from small groups of students are pulled towards the subject average in proportion to how small the group is (a group of 15 counts about a third as much as a large one), so a handful of very happy students can’t top a ranking. The tables still show the real figures.
We combine the measures using the weights above, then scale the result so the top university in each subject scores 100 and the lowest scores 0. Scottish universities are compared on entry points only with each other, because most of their students apply with Highers, which earn more UCAS points than A-levels. A university needs student satisfaction data plus at least two other measures to be ranked. If a measure isn’t published, we treat it as exactly average for the subject, so the university is neither rewarded nor penalised. Those universities are marked with an asterisk.
Limits you should know
- Small courses can swing from year to year. Where data is thin, HESA combines years or uses a broader subject group.
- Salaries depend partly on where graduates live and work, so London universities tend to show higher pay.
- A low score doesn’t mean a course is bad. It means it came lower on these measures than the others compared.
- Rankings can’t tell you whether a place suits you. Visit, and read the course details on the university’s own site.
Corrections
If you spot an error, contact us through the About page and we’ll fix it.