University to back Norrington Table
IT HAS been labelled ‘informal', ‘divisive', and even ‘notorious', but from this year ‘official' will be the best way to describe the Norrington Table, as the university is moving to back the controversial college ranking system. Despite Oxford's public denunciation of the table, which ranks colleges by the exam results of their students, The Oxford Student has obtained internal papers that show the university has been secretly compiling its own Norrington Table.
The emergence of the document, marked ‘strictly confidential', has forced Oxford to clarify its position on the table. A spokeswoman this week said the university will now rank colleges by exam results, and that this information will be passed to the media in a move to stop inaccurate data being published.
The Oxford Student reported in November that the Norrington Table published in July 2004 by the Times contained numerous errors, resulting in colleges being ranked up to 13 places from their true positions. Data protection legislation now allows students to withhold their names from finals results published outside the Examination Schools. These results are the source of the Times' Norrington Table. The newspaper pays resourceful undergraduates up to £500 for gathering the data.
For decades Oxford has refused to cooperate in the compilation of the table, maintaining that the “different subject mix and size of colleges” renders comparison by exam results invalid. Yet in November the university announced that it had undertaken “an exercise to collect the Finals results from colleges” with a view to publishing a “complete statistical table” of the results. At that time the university was quick to stress that it did not support drawing up college rankings from the results.
Documents circulated to college heads at the time included an alphabetical listing of colleges' finals results. However a university spokeswoman this week admitted it was “probably inevitable that the media would turn any alphabetical listing into a ranked table”. The policy u-turn is a far cry from 1992 when, in an attempt to thwart the Norrington Table's compilation, the university stopped printing college names in the published list of students' results.
Enterprising undergraduates found ways around the measures and in 1998 the university admitted defeat and reintroduced the publication of college names. The Norrington Table was conceived by Sir Arthur Norrington in a 1962 letter to the Times. Sir Arthur, then President of Trinity College, famously dreamt up the table whilst in the bath. Colleges receive five points for a first, three for a 2:1, two for a 2:2, and one for a third.
Colleges' final marks are expressed as a percentage of the maximum mark they could have gained, had every student been awarded a first. Merton have topped the table for the past three years.
17th Feb 2005