Who will I be better than now? – Cambridge may scrap academic rankings

Cambridge students and staff were recently jolted by unexpected news that the university is considering doing away with academic rankings.

Why? Because, apparently, rankings “foster a culture of overwork.” Imagine. At Cambridge. Overwork? Shocking.

As an English student, I have a natural aversion to numbers unless they’re referring to lines in Shakespeare. So you’d think I’d be delighted at the prospect of fewer lists, less competition, and a world where I gently float through exams like an oblivious swan. I’ve spent years gleefully deconstructing the idea that value can be measured at all—unless, of course, we’re talking about the worth of a particularly juicy metaphor.

And yet—prepare the pitchforks—I think scrapping academic rankings is a mistake.

Why Ditching Rankings could be a Good Idea:

To begin with, the case for the Ranking’s abolition is hardly frivolous. The correlation between Cambridge’s intense academic culture and mental health challenges is well-documented. You’d be hard-pressed to find a student here who hasn’t cried into a Tupperware of pasta at 2 am while contemplating how they went from top of their sixth form class to “mid-table mediocrity” in a single term.

Between the pressure to be the cleverest in a room full of very clever people and the art form that is competitive suffering, it’s tough. Rankings—published, numerical, brutal—only add fuel. They confirm every imposter-syndrome spiral you’ve ever had. Got a 2.2 while your friend aced a First? Great—enjoy a year of an internalised loop of “you’re not good enough” in Times New Roman.

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Without rankings, students could focus more on learning for its own sake. (I.e., return to the utopian idea that we’re here to engage with ideas, not gladiator-fight each other for the last First.) It could make collaboration easier—no more passive-aggressive study groups where everyone’s secretly hoping your point about enjambment is wrong.

It’s also a way to level the playing field. Let’s not pretend everyone at Cambridge arrived with the same background. For some students, the process of even getting here involved navigating underfunded state schools, working part-time jobs, or being the first in their family to attend university. For others, it involved having a Classics tutor at the age of eight and holidays to Florence where one “really felt the Bernini.” Rankings can exacerbate those inequalities: they give a sheen of meritocracy to what is often just good schooling and inherited confidence.

The looming dangers of rankings continue to draw Cambridge students to lectures in record numbers. Image credits: Evie du Bois

The Case against Abolishing Rankings: Don’t Scrap Them

Let me be clear: I’m not arguing that academic rankings are perfect. But I am saying that removing them entirely isn’t a good idea. Yes, the numbers might be ugly—but they’re not the problem. They just show it.

The rankings are brutal, but at least they’re honest. In a university that frequently lurches between wellbeing initiatives and 12 am essay deadlines, there’s something almost refreshing about the bluntness of a list. You did well. You didn’t. It’s not personal (even if it feels like it is). It’s a snapshot of a particular exam season. Is it your whole worth as a person? Obviously not. But at least it’s real.

There’s also a perverse kind of clarity to it. When you get your ranking, you know where you stand. You can laugh. Cry. Rage against the structure of academic success. Eat a whole M&S brownie tub and recover. Without rankings, we risk being trapped in that horrible post-exam limbo of vague marks and whispered speculation.

You can easily spend three years being gently told you’re doing “well” without really knowing what that means. The rankings may be ruthless, but they provide a final reality check that sometimes, frankly, we need. You might have spent an entire term crafting gorgeous essays comparing Kafka to Kierkegaard, but if you bomb your final exam on Tragedy, the rankings will let you know that perhaps your essay on Hamlet being a proto-existentialist TikToker wasn’t as ironclad as you thought.

And dare I say it: some like the rankings. I don’t mean that in a cutthroat, sadistic or malicious way. I mean, some people genuinely enjoy the sense of closure, of measurable progress. It’s easy to mock the “grindset” culture of Cambridge, but for many students, especially in humanities subjects like English, the rankings are one of the few tangible bits of feedback we ever get. We’re not in labs. We don’t have problem sheets. We’re just out here writing sonnet analysis and trying not to combust.

A Final Note on Elitism, Ego, and the Real World

The real problem isn’t the rankings—it’s the environment around them. If we’re serious about student wellbeing, then scrapping the symptom won’t fix the cause. What we need is cultural change: to normalise talking about academic struggle, to challenge the Cambridge myth that perfection is the only level acceptable, to stop treating a 2.1 like an insult.

Rankings can be part of a wider ecosystem, but they shouldn’t be the sole arbiter of self-worth. Equally, removing them entirely won’t suddenly usher in a golden age of holistic, stress-free learning. It will just mean we’re all equally confused, equally anxious, and equally in the dark.

There’s also an argument to be made—however uncomfortable—that rankings prepare you for the world beyond Cambridge. Not in a soulless corporate “real world” way, but in a more basic sense that the world is full of judgments. Sometimes you will fail. Sometimes you will be outperformed. Sometimes, someone else will write a better Freudian analysis of Woolf’s melancholy than you. Learning how to process that, and keep going, is not a failure of the university experience—it’s part of it.

More cynically: do we really think Cambridge students, historically one of the most elite, self-obsessed, overachieving demographic slices of the country, the world, will genuinely thrive in a situation without rankings? Come off it. We’ll invent our own hierarchies. We already have. Who’s got the best adjectives on their essay feedback? Who quoted the most obscure Derrida in their dissertation? Who cries the quietest in the faculty toilet cubicles?

It does occur to this writer that if she spent less time taking photos of libraries and spent more time working in them, perhaps her final ranking would be higher. Image credits: Evie du Bois

Conclusion: Reform, Don’t Remove

So no—I don’t think the rankings should be scrapped. They should be made clearer. They should be contextualised.  I think we should be allowed to hate them and still recognise their usefulness. Students should be taught what they mean and how much weight to give them. Getting rid of them entirely is like taking the mirror off the wall because you don’t like your haircut.

If we’re serious about wellbeing, let’s talk about how students are supported. Let’s talk about workload, the way failure is discussed (or not discussed). Let’s talk about the structural inequalities baked into the system. Let’s just not pretend that removing one mechanism of evaluation will change a deeply entrenched academic culture.

Besides, what else are we supposed to bond over, if not a shared sense of mild despair when the rankings drop? Cambridge friendships are built not on sunshine and daisies, but on mutual commiseration and a deep, unspoken understanding that yes, we’re all doing our best, even if our essays on Edmund Spencer fell apart somewhere around paragraph three.

In the end, rankings aren’t the problem. They’re just the part of the system we can see. And if the rest of the system remains unchanged, scrapping them won’t free us. It’ll just leave us floundering—equally anxious, but now with no numbers to blame.

Anyway, what else are we going to gossip about in the Van of Life queue?