Wonky tables?

Your article "Bringing meaning to the tables" (June 10) notes the scepticism that newspaper league tables attract in academia. Readers may be interested to learn about The Sunday Times ' method of compiling information.

Selected heads of departments and admissions tutors recently received an e-mail in which they were asked to rate competitor departments for The Sunday Times University Guide 2005 . The exercise presents itself as peer assessment based on a US model. It offers no criteria by which judgment might equitably be made or results then measured, nor does it request any evidence to support the judgments.

This exposes an already skewed, if not misguidedly prejudiced, set of parameters within which any limited exercise might be conducted, and that renders any results flawed to the point of being useless to those who might seek to use such data. How can an exercise that "should not take more than a few minutes" make The Sunday Times University Guid e "more authoritative"?

The fact that any response about competitor institutions is in confidence is contrary to the culture of increased transparency that is demanded of higher education institutions.

Parents and prospective students should be alert to the fallibility of such league tables. The Standing Conference of University Drama Departments (Scudd) has called for a boycott of the survey.

Carole-Anne Upton, Franc Chamberlain, Mark Batty and David Pattie
Scudd ( www.scudd.org.uk )
Mark Everist
National Association for Music in Higher Education chair