The name of each university.
Description of the course.
The U.K. region that each university is in.
The entry requirements.
The grades required.
The points required.
The Sunday times rating of each university.
The cost of fees of the university.
The cost of travel to and from university.
The student will be using a large data set of about 30 universities and will need to reduce this to 6 suitable universities. The student will use various sources of information including: CDroms, the Internet (, , ), books, teachers and prospectuses.
The successful Universities will need to meet certain criteria; in particular they will need to:
Be the best value for money.
Have a high Sunday Times rating.
Be outside of Northern Ireland.
Handling Data
In obtaining suitable data, the student discovered that not all Universities presented entry requirements for their courses in a point format. Rather, the standardised A-Level grade format was used, i.e. A, B, C, D, E and N. In order to compare the entry requirements for each University, the student used a conversion table to convert the grades shown into the Point Format.
Conversion from Grades to Points
The student then used Microsoft Excel to create a conversion table in the form of a graph, shown in appendix 1.1 to aid the conversion of points.
Methodology
Obtaining the Data
To start the investigation the student visited the UCAS website ()
A screen dump of the full web page is available in appendix 1.2.
The student found this website very useful and provided the majority of information needed to complete the investigation. The student noted however that the entry requirements for one of the local Universities was not provided.
The student therefore visited the website of this particular University i.e. Queens University Belfast ()
A screen dump of the full web page is available in appendix 1.3.
However the student does not wish to pursue his studies in Northern Ireland. To explore Universities in other regions of the United Kingdom that offers this type of course the student decided to use Google’s Complex Search Facility () to search for necessary criteria and entry requirements.
A screen dump of the full web page showing search criteria is available in appendix 1.4.
To obtain details of University ratings the student consulted the Sunday Time University Guide. This provided information about 123 Universities in the U.K.
Each university was given an overall rating based upon the other seven rating. The student used this rating together with the teaching rating to identify specific University course of choice. (See spreadsheet)
Finally, Due to the amount of data that the student needed to gather, a flowchart was designed to ensure no errors were made in this process. (See appendix 1.5)
The student also used a graphical source from the DENI website (). (See appendix). The source showed key trends such as the fact that the standards of grades of students leaving schools are increasing; this therefore means that there is more competition as higher levels of students go to university. The student was also able to notice from the source that the amount of students with GCSE’s from grade A* to C has increased also during the period of 1988 to 2000. Students achieving grades of A* to C has increased from 38,000 to over 50,000 showing a considerable increase. He also noticed that the amount of students with 2 or more A-levels has increased steadily during the time 1988 to 2000. over the 12 years the amount of students leaving school with 2 or more A-levels has increased from around 20,000 to around 31,000.
Appendices
Sources
Appendix1.1
To compare the entry requirements for each University the student used a conversion table to convert the grades shown into the Point Format.
Turn to next page of appendices.
Apendix1.2
To start the investigation the student visited the UCAS website ()
Appendix1.3
The student visited the website of Queens University Belfast ()
Appendix1.4
The student decided to use Google’s Complex Search Facility ()
