Hi Akshay
RAE is really useful and it more often closely matches the impressions UK people have of UK universities than the rankings do. For example both Birmingham and Manchester Universities do great in the RAE, because they are world-leading research universities and all British people consider them to be amongst the country’s best universities, however the Times rankings suggests that universities such as Lancaster and Leicester are better (which is just not the case).
That being said they are a measure of how good a university (or department) is in its research only and unless you are a PHD student this does not directly affect you. It can be the case that professors who are world-leaders in their research do not make great teachers (or cannot dedicate so much time to their students). For this reason never consider the RAE results by themselves, consider other factors one of which is rankings but there are others such as:
- course content
- environment of the university
- feedback from other students
I do like the RAE results because they are accurate and stable. They are used to decide how much funding each department should receive from the British government (the best departments get the most money) and this is decided by how highly rated the research work of each department is amongst academics at other universities – so it is accurate. It is also stable, In the last 10 years it has been updated only twice (the exercise is too time-consuming to do yearly), this adds to the credibility of its results and avoids the inconsistencies of rankings such as The Times or The Guardian, where a university can go from being ordinary to world-beating in just 12 months.
So, I do like RAE but consider other measurements as well. After all, I chose my university on how pretty I thought the campus was!!!
