Tompkins Table
From Freepedia
The Tompkins Table is an annual ranking that lists the colleges of the University of Cambridge in order of their students' performances in that year's final examinations. It was created in 1981 by Peter Tompkins, an undergraduate mathematics student. While the difference between the highest places on the table is usually very slight, colleges remain very competitive about their rankings on the Tompkins Table. The rankings are not officially endorsed by the university.
The corresponding rankings for the University of Oxford is the Norrington Table.
- St Catharine's College
- Gonville and Caius College
- Trinity College
- Christ's College
- Emmanuel College
- Pembroke College
- Jesus College
- Queens' College
- Clare College
- King's College
- Robinson College
- St John's College
- Fitzwilliam College
- Sidney Sussex College
- Downing College
- Corpus Christi College
- Trinity Hall
- Churchill College
- Selwyn College
- Magdalene College
- Newnham College
- Peterhouse
- Wolfson College
- Girton College
- New Hall
- Homerton College
- Lucy Cavendish College
- St Edmund's College
- Hughes Hall
Although certain colleges (such as Emmanuel, Christ's and Trinity) always place highly in the Tompkin's Table, positions can and do fluctuate wildly from year to year.
The university also goes to some length to point out that people in the lower-placed colleges do often get firsts and people in the higher-placed college still get thirds - this is down to the simple fact that, although there is some academic variation between colleges, this is nowhere near as pronounced as the variation one might expect between different universities (since lectures, exams, and sometimes even supervisions at Cambridge are centrally organised by the university rather than by the individual colleges).
