Monday, July 21, 2008

Another Use of Rankings

BBC News reports that graduates of lower ranking universities are more dishonest than those from institutions further up the ranking ladder.

"Analysis of 3,876 financial service job applications found embellishments on the forms of 43% of applicants from the UK's lowest ranking universities.

Only 14% of applicants from the top 20 UK universities were found to have fibbed in their applications.

The survey was commissioned by a pre-employment screening firm, Powerchex.
Its managing director Alexandra Kelly said: "What this survey says is that graduates from lesser-known universities may feel the need to alter their background to compete."

There is no definitive ranking of universities. For the survey the researchers at the Shell technology and enterprise programme used the Times Online 2009 ranking. "



Given the amount of soft marking and numbers massaging that British universities do to get a good place in the rankings, is it posible that graduates of the good ones do not need to embellish their CVs because their universities do all the necessary embellishment for them?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This is a really interesting piece of research. The results are not that surprising as students have, I imagine, chosen their university based on merits. Probably using logic somewhere along the line of best uni = best job. Flawed yes, but that's how the greater consciousness works!

I'd of really liked to have seen this analysis extended to include degree grade. I'd imagine you may find the reverse in this case: a student with a perceived poor result from a great university may feel more pressure to hide this fact.

What do you think?