On the whole, students consider that their courses are worthwhile. For example, the vast majority of students ( 85%) rated the quality of the teaching and learning experience as good or excellent in a recent National Union of Students survey (opens in new window). If you are interested in a particular discipline at a particular university, see Unistats (opens in new window) to see what final year students thought of the course, what percentage stayed the course, what degree classification they got and what they went on to afterwards.

Universities also provide a lot of other information designed to help students judge for themselves what they will get from a course. Alongside the prospectus and other services such as Open Days, universities publish detailed information, called “Programme Specifications (opens in new window)”, about the undergraduate courses they offer. In terms of choosing a university and a course, there is good advice on the UCAS website (opens in new window).

But we can see that prospective students might want even more information about courses before they apply. Therefore, UUK have supported HEFCE's (opens in new window) research into public information needs, particularly the needs of prospective students. This research has lead to the recommendation that from September 2012, prospective higher education students will have easy access to a Key Information Set (KIS) to help them choose what and where to study.