Christmas cheer for Warwick in RAE

The holiday season brought tidings of comfort to Warwick as the university claimed seventh place in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise, which measures the quality of academic output in the country’s universities.

The university’s research leads that of other institutions in the Midlands, according to the results.

Prof. Nigel Thrift, Warwick’s vice-chancellor, said: “This positive result is the outcome of much hard work and commitment on the part of staff at Warwick. This is a wonderful recognition of that work and will serve to ensure Warwick builds an even more prominent national and international research profile.”

Public bodies will allocate over GBP1.5bn of higher education funding based on the RAE data.

“The Higher Education Funding Council will now go away with these figures and decide how much of the pot we will get, but we should do really well out of this,” Peter Dunn, university spokesman, told the Birmingham Post

This year’s appraisal uses a four-point scale to rate research, with each department’s score reflecting the average quality of published work. In the 2001 RAE, a five-point scale was used while the results showed the proportion of faculty members producing research of the highest grade.

Cambridge claimed the summit of the rankings, with 71 per cent of its research considered “world-leading” or “internationally excellent”.

Overall, 65 per cent of Warwick’s academic staff produced similar work.

The results this year gave a fillip to the university’s Film Studies department which ranked in first place, and was one of only seven departments in Britain to have more than half of its research graded “world-leading”.

Warwick came second-best in French and History to Oxford and Imperial College respectively. It mustered a joint third place in the rankings for Economics, which were topped by the London School of Economics and University College London.

Some other departments also finished in the country’s top ten. Warwick Business School came fifth, the Politics department seventh and Chemistry eighth. The Engineering department and Warwick Medical School were both ranked tenth.

The results also provided cheer for the Mathematics department. While claiming seventh place in applied Mathematics, Warwick came second in pure Mathematics and fourth in Statistics.