How we grade

Every grade comes from the same six criteria, weighted as below. The method is published so you can disagree with it.

Curriculum depth — 20%

How much ground the syllabus actually covers, and how recently it was revised.

Faculty & teaching — 15%

Live contact hours, who teaches them, and whether anyone answers a question.

Career outcomes — 25%

What the qualification changes for the people who finish it. The heaviest weight, deliberately.

Flexibility & delivery — 15%

Whether you can genuinely study around a job, and where exams have to be sat.

Value for fee — 15%

The total cost against what is delivered — including charges disclosed late.

Recognition & approvals — 10%

Whether the award is a degree, and whether the body was entitled to give it in that mode.

Why we grade routes, not colleges

We publish grades for programme types, not for named institutions. There are 2,877 colleges in our directory and no defensible basis on which to score them one by one. Publishing invented grades about real organisations would be dishonest and unfair to them.

What we can say with confidence is how an open university online MBA compares with a private university one, or how either compares with a twelve-week course sold as a “mini MBA”. Those are structural differences, and structure is gradeable.

What cannot change a grade

No institution can pay to raise a grade, remove one, or keep a route off the page. We are paid by institutions when a student enrols through us — which is precisely why the grades are about categories rather than about the institutions who might pay us.

When we are wrong

Grades move when facts move. Tell us what we have got wrong and we will look at it.