I want to know the top three universities in Uk to study product design

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Request for Question Clarification by leli-ga on 24 Jan 2004 11:27 PST

Hello Cathy

There isn't an easy way of picking out the top three, unfortunately,
but perhaps we could help you all the same.

Most UK universities offering product design courses include them
within a larger department, usually engineering. This makes ranking
the courses difficult because most information on quality is about the
whole department, not particular courses.

We could pick out a few product design courses run by university
departments with good reputations, and explain how we chose them.
Would this be any help?

Leli

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Clarification of Question by cathy56-ga on 25 Jan 2004 08:56 PST

Yes, I think this would help. Please do it.

Thanks for getting back to me, Cathy. 

I've narrowed it down to a few courses which look promising, but I do
recommend that you gather as much information as you can before making
any decision. Although Nottingham and Loughborough seem to be the
outstanding departments of Mechanical Engineering with product design
courses on offer, I wanted to give you a longer list of possibilities.
One course might be excellent, but not quite what you want.

If you are searching for the best places to study product design, I
suggest you look at the courses offered by the following universities.
(After this short-list I'll explain how I made these choices.)
In alphabetical order:

Aston
http://www.aston.ac.uk/ug/pros/easpd.htm

Brunel
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/courses/ug/M/MEAD.shtml

Glasgow/Glasgow School of Art
http://www.mech.gla.ac.uk/Undergrad/degrees/pde/csepde.html

Heriot-Watt
http://www.hw.ac.uk/prosp/ug/courses/h770.php

Liverpool
http://www.liv.ac.uk/University/study_at_liverpool/UG/H7G4.htm

Loughborough
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/mm/prospective/pdm.html

Newcastle
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/undergraduate/course/H771/profile/1022151758

Nottingham
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/school4m/undergraduate/Prospective/Product/

Strathclyde
http://www.dmem.strath.ac.uk/Courses/PDE/


There is also a new course at Leeds which might be of interest:

Leeds
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/product-design/PD/whatisit.htm



So this is how I drew up the list.

First I went to the Universities & Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS)
website and searched for all product design courses in the UK.
You can search for product design courses from here:
http://search.ucas.co.uk/cgi-bin/hsrun/search/cs2002/StateId/CZCxM3V1_O1R7SOaclcRsdTMTDYJI-VuMp/HAHTpage/cs2002.Hsindex2.run?s=1039&w=Product+design&p=Y&t=200&pn=66

After browsing this section for a while, I decided to to work through
the list of "all product design courses"
http://search.ucas.co.uk/cgi-bin/hsrun/search/cs2002/StateId/CZCxM3V1_O1R7SOaclcRsdTMTDYJI-VuMp/HAHTpage/cs2002.Hsindex10.run?r=N&i=N&a=101
I noted down most of the universities offering product design courses.
(I eliminated non-university colleges and some universities I just
knew wouldn't end up in a top ten.)

Next I went to the Guardian Education website for information on
rankings, quality etc. You could use this site to rank university
departments in a number of different ways, but I concentrated on the
Teaching Inspection score, the overall Guardian Teaching score and the
Entry score given for the Department of Mechanical Engineering at each
university I was considering.

Teaching Inspection Score
-------------------------

The teaching score is based on an assessment by Quality Assurance
Agency Inspectors. Please note the reason why so many departments have
a score of 4 here:

"For inspections where assessors expressed results in terms of
satisfactory/highly satisfactory and excellent, we allocated
departments judged as satisfactory/highly satisfactory in band 4, and
in band 6 those judged as excellent."

Guardian Teaching Score
-----------------------

This is calculated by the Education Guardian itself, putting the main
emphasis on teaching but also including other factors like
staff-student ratios. Read more about how they calculate these figures
on the page where the quote above can be found:
http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/universityguide/story/0,9889,959140,00.html

Entry Score
-----------

The department's reputation is closely related to how many
applications they receive and how high they set entry standards. For
instance, the highest possible entry score of 6 suggests you would
need A-level results of at least ABB to be admitted. The higher the
entry requirements, the more popular the course, though of course this
can reflect the popularity of the university overall and not just the
particular department.


I made a short list of departments with an overall Guardian Teaching
Score of at least 70, an Entry Score of at least 5, and a Teaching
Inspection Score of at least 4.


I ended up with this:


University        Teaching         Overall        Entry
                   score            score
============================================================

Brunel            4                70             5
Glasgow           4                72             5
Leeds             4                73             5
Liverpool         4                70             5
Loughborough      6                86             5
Newcastle         4                76             5
Nottingham        6                88             6
Strathclyde       6                82             5


You can explore the Guardian tables yourself here:
http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/unitable/0,,-4664362,00.html?index=4&start=60


Next I consulted the list drawn up by the Times, which uses somewhat
different criteria, including the Research Assessment Exercise scores
which reflect the quality of research undertaken by academic staff in
the department. All the universities which scored well in the Guardian
tables are in the top half of the Times list, as are:

Aston       (ranked number 10)
Heriot-Watt (ranked number 20)

Click on "mechanical engineering" to reach the Times list here: 
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,6734,00.html


As I'm sure you'll notice, Nottingham and Loughborough are rated very
highly in both ranking systems.


Of course there are many other things you may want to consider, including:

Does the course include a chance to study abroad for a term or year?
What is on offer in the way of work experience?
Can you get to an Open Day to help decide if you, or the prospective
student, would be happy at that university?


Clicking on the unversity names in the Education Guardian tables will
take you to a short description of the university.
The Independent also has sketches of each university available from this page:
http://education.independent.co.uk/higher/az_universities/


Further links
-------------

UCAS home page
http://www.ucas.com/

UCAS course search
http://search.ucas.co.uk/cs2002/cs.html

UCAS A-level points system
http://www.ucas.ac.uk/new/press/archive/news1999/press1012.html

How to use the Times subject tables
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,716-672387,00.html

The Times Good University Guide 2004
http://www.grenvillesales.co.uk/times/bookredirect.asp?ProdCode=1guu


If you feel you would like me to clarify anything in this answer,
please just ask. I know how important it is to have as much
information as you can when making decisions about your future, or the
future of someone close to you.

Each university website should have information on Open Day dates and
prospectuses or brochures. Once you have read the prospectus, you can
send further queries to the admissions tutor. If any of the sites are
difficult to navigate, please let me know and I'll try to help.

This answer is based on my knowledge of the UK education system,
including helping my own children with university applications. I
sincerely hope it will be useful for you.

Best Wishes - Leli


Searches:
I found searching with terms like "product design" "best courses" etc.
did not add anything helpful to the information available on the
well-established sites I already knew about.

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Clarification of Answer by leli-ga on 26 Jan 2004 01:30 PST

Hello again Cathy

I've discovered that the direct links to the lists of product design
courses will not work and you will need to make a fresh search
yourself.

Start here:
http://search.ucas.co.uk/cs2002/cs.html

Click on "2004"
Click on "subjects"
Select "P"
Scroll down and click on "product design"
Click "all product design courses"
Lastly you can choose to "view all product design courses" or "refine
search by university".

Hope this helps - Leli

It also may help if you peruse though some trade journals or industry
conference programs to determine the leaders of your chosen field are.
 Once you have a list go though it and determine the what degree and
school each entry attended.  This may be somewhat better since as Leli
pointed out much of the information you are looking for will be
obscured by the larger departments in general.

Many apologies for adding this comment to this thread, but I did not
know of another way to communicate with stelk-ga. I found an answer to
the wieght of the honda civic engine, kinda. Try this page:
http://www.angelfire.com/ar/dw42/engfyi.htm. Once again my apologies
on posting unrelatedly.

this is an exteremely comprehensive answer. was wondering how come
Coventry did not figure in the list of colleges offering top rated
product design courses?