Forums | Unistats group 7

11 November 2013, 14:56

Unistats is the official site that allows you to search for and compare data and information on university and college courses from across the UK. The site draws together comparable information on those areas that students have identified as important in making decisions about what and where to study. The items that students thought were most useful have been included in a Key Information Set (KIS), which can be found on the Overview tab for each course.

The site draws on the following official data on higher education courses:

• Student satisfaction from the National Student Survey
• Student destinations on finishing their course from the Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education survey
• How the course is taught and study patterns
• How the course is assessed
• Course accreditation
• Course costs (such as tuition fees and accommodation)

These data have been provided by the Higher Education Statistics Agency, HESA, the Data Service, universities and colleges and Ipsos MORI (National Student Survey)

You can use Unistats to find out what previous students thought about the course, as well as to learn about the likely costs and the kind of jobs or further study  which students who completed the course went on to do. 

It is important to remember when you use Unistats that the information here is designed to give an indication of what it might be like on the course you select.  Obviously, the experience of each course will be different for each person, and will differ from year to year.

Some of the information on Unistats, for example on student satisfaction and employment outcomes, is retrospective - and some of it, like fee information, is for the next academic year.  You should be careful to make sure that you understand which year the data relate to.

When comparing survey data for courses, care should be taken especially where the differences between courses are small. To help you interpret the data, the site will show the number of respondents to the survey for each course. For some courses these data may be grouped to show survey results for more than one year or more than one course. The site will indicate where this has happened and will show the total number of respondents in the grouped data.   In general, differences of less than ten percentage points between two courses each with a small but similar number of respondents (e.g. 30), are unlikely to be statistically meaningful.

Please see the section Why not all courses have full KIS data sets for further information on how the survey data is grouped for courses with small numbers of students, new courses, or courses with responses from less than half of their students. Please note that sometimes there may be no data and that this is not an indicator of quality.

Where information has been collected from fewer than 53 students, the percentages you see (e.g. on bar charts and pie charts) on Unistats have been rounded up or down to the nearest five percentage points. To calculate a percentage (to show that, e.g. 8 out of 24 students got a first class degree) we would divide 8 by 24, then multiply by 100, which equals 33.33% - this figure would then be rounded up to 35%.  

If data have been collected from more than 53 students though, the percentages shown are rounded up or down to the nearest one percentage point (e.g. 39.89% would become 40%).