Imperial has placed seventh in the Guardian’s league table of British universities, coming behind Durham, Surrey and Loughborough.

Imperial usually takes third place in league tables of UK universities but in this league table, St Andrews comes straight in after Cambridge and Oxford.

The Guardian’s league table doesn’t factor research scores into its rankings because, according to them, “they are not important to students”.

We’re up on last year, when we took eighth place. Loughborough, famous for sport, has swooped in from eleventh to fourth place, joint with Surrey.

The Guardian gives each university a score out of 100, considering how much money is spent per student, employment prospects, student staff ratio, entry demands and student satisfaction, with several of these factors extrapolated from the National Student Survey. The combination of these gave Imperial a score of 84.4 out of 100.

Durham beat us by only half a point to come in at sixth, and Surrey and Loughborough (joint fourth) both had scores of 85.

The Guardian’s data for Imperial student satisfaction with both teaching and the course was relatively high, but our score for satisfaction with feedback was very low, at only 66.7 out of 100.

There was also a course-level ranking of universities. In physics and medicine we came eighth, computing fourth, maths second, and mechanical engineering first. For Chemistry, the Guardian put as way down in nineteenth place.