Understand where our data comes from, what we display and how it works.

A big part of the information that we provided for courses is by the The Key Information Set, or KIS, is published by HEFCE (The Higher Education Funding Council for England) and HESA (The Higher Education Statistics Agency).

KIS provides a large data set of available courses, average/s for salary, UCAS grades and many more. KIS dataset holds information which students have provided, and is available for sites like Uni Compare to use.

University profile information is predominantly provided by universities and colleges. This includes, and not limited too; Total students, grad salary, about information, entry stats, student stats, more information, videos, images and custom tracking links.

With some universities, they may be required to supply additional content, as well as evidence of the statistics for the information that they are providing. This ensures that our users are being provided with the best user experience.

Students choose to leave reviews on universities/courses on our site from either our app or site services. The reviews written are predominantly healthy and encouraging for universities, with students offering an insights into their real-life experiences.

The opinions expressed in the reviews are very much those of individual users of Uni Compare, they are not the views of Uni Compare Ltd, and even though we publish this content, we are not held responsible for the content that they publish. The university has the right to dispute a student review, should they feel it breaches fair-play policies.

Knowingly how often Open Days change, we have a series of methods that our in-house staff and university staff complete to try and stay as accurate as possible. All Open Day listings are overseen by our account managers, as well as other in-house staff and university staff.

Articles are written by a mix of university staff, external freelancer writers, in house staff and students. We believe offering multiple views and writing styles can help offer a personalized experience to all users that are using our services. If you would like to submit content, please do so by using our contact page.

Our rankings, recommended scores, and student reviews use a qualitative system to determine a university's score and a quantitive scoring system that helps validate it. Our ranking system is very similar to what you see online via TripAdvisor, Airbnb, UBER and many other brands; the more reviews a university gets, the more we value that group of reviews.

If a university has only 1 review, which has rated the university 5, we cannot trust review until we gather a larger sample size. We have a qualitative rating formula below that highlights how trust builds as the sample size increases. Tens of thousands of reviews determine our yearly rankings, and our reviews help determine a score to 5 decimal places. To help make the scores easier to read for users, we reduce the scores to 2 decimal places.

Please see below for a simplistic way of how we score the university reviews and how we validate them:

We use data supplied by HESA and our student reviews to inform the subject rankings. More specifically, this included data on the ‘Graduate Outcomes’ of each subject, mapped to the university they attended.

The ‘Graduate Reflections’ uses polling data on student’s perception of these outcomes and how happy they were with the outcome. Our Student Reviews data is used to inform the ‘Student Satisfaction’ metric.

This data, paired with a ‘Research Quality’ score, is aggregated to rank the top universities, broken down by subject type (or faculty). We use min-max feature scaling to provide a value between 0 and 1 per metric which is then combined to create an overall score.

The final rankings tables show the actual scores for the individual metrics alongside the blended, overall rank for that university for a specific subject. You can find the breakdown of weighting and data sources in the table below:

Our student reviews and university rankings are invariably linked, they follow the same structure, and the review scores help determine the university rank. We focus significantly on the reviews validating as the number of reviews increase.

We have listed soft outlines below that showcase that a university must receive many unique student reviews for it to contribute to the overall university score. All reviews must derive from unique IP addresses, and must complete a captcha to prove human authenticity.

We work with an independent third party that helps gather our student reviews; this helps us identify unique entries and run reliable captchas to verify a human interaction.