The University Challenge Rankings
The quiz show, University Challenge, provides a plausible supplement to the established British league tables. If we award 2 points for winning and one for being runner up (I confess this is from Wikipedia) then we get this ranking:
1. Oxford 39
2. Cambridge 21
3. Manchester 8
4=. Imperial College London 5
4=. Open University 5
6=. Durham 4
6=. Sussex 4
8=. St. Andrews 3
8=. Birkbeck College, University of London 3
10=. Bradford 2
10=. Dundee 2
10=. Keele 2
10=. Leicester 2
10=. Belfast 2
10=. Warwick 2
16 = Lancaster 2
16=. LSE 1
16=. Cranfield 1
16=. Sheffield 1
16=. York 1
Bristol, Edinburgh and University College are not there at all and LSE does not perform very well.
The show inspired an Indian version and in one memorable "cup winners' cup" final Sardar Patel College of Engineering beat Gonville and Caius, Cambridge.
Apologies for the weird spacing. I am looking up how to do tables in blogspot.
Oxford and Cambridge participate not as university teams but as college ones. This means that it is not simply three or four Oxford or Cambridge students competing each year but multiple dozens. On the simplifying though admittedly counterfactual assumption that each team entering the contest has an equal chance of winning, this would significantly bump up the probability that an Oxford or Cambridge affiliated team would win, compared to teams from, say, Bristol, Edinburg, or UCL.
ReplyDeleteStandard HTML tables never worked well for me in Blogger, so please let me know if you figure it out.
ReplyDelete