St. Andrews goes for Gold

St. Andrews has, once again, outdone itself on the academic excellence front. The Teaching Excellence Framework have ranked St. Andrews as 'gold' standard for our teaching quality and excellence for outcomes for students.

The TEF have rated 295 universities, colleges and higher education institutes on their teaching standards, provisional being the lowest, and gold being awarded for 'delivering consistently outstanding teaching, learning and outcomes for its students' and being 'of the highest quality found in the UK'.

This is good news for St. Andrews at least, however as a whole this system for ranking Universities has been highly controversial nationwide. Many top UK universities have missed out on the top awards, whilst many newer universities have been handed the top award.

Ten of the top 21 Russell Group universities missed out on the Gold award, including LSE, which has led experts to suggest that these results, whilst promising for many teaching institutions are to be taken with a pinch of salt and not to be used as the only guide when making judgements about universities.

There are also many concerns that the new way of ranking universities is going to be a license to raise tuition fees, and that it'll also do some major damage to universities reputations.

St. Andrews is one of only a few Scottish Universities to make the list, including University of Abertay Dundee, which was awarded Silver, University of Dundee, who achieved Gold, Heriot-Watt, which was awarded Silver and Robert Gordon University who also achieved Gold.

Principal Professor Sally Mapstone was quoted to say that the results tells prospective students that 'in coming to St Andrews they can be confident of an experience of the highest quality'.

You can view the official release from the University website with full quotes from the Principal, Proctor, Vice-Principal and President of the Student's association, here:

www.st-andrews.ac.uk/news/archive/2017/title,1383642,en.php