Hello All,
This is my first post on the forum. DS is in year 12. Can someone suggest good universities for CompSci degree please? Predictions are likely to be A*,A*,A, A(M,FM,Phy,Chem).
We are clueless as we are not able to physically visit any Uni and we are new to UCAS process.
Thanks.
gsmum

Welcome to the forum.

I feel as though we've had this question fairly recently. I will have a look later when I am on my computer.

The Student Room is better for this question - see how the grades are likely to be at the end if Year 12. No-one can give accurate predictions after a few weeks.

I'd go for a university offering a year in Industry ... and look for accreditation.

Thank you scary mum and guest 55. I will look on the student room. Thanks

Presumably your DS has at least 'attended' some of the virtual open days which have been run by the universities over the past few months? You can also, of course, visit the areas in which universities are situated (assuming within reasonable travelling distance). Some campuses are open e.g. both Birmingham and UEA have galleries on site which are open to the public and universities like Bristol and Manchester are in the city, not within an enclosed area. Obviously, you can't actually go into any buildings, but your DS can get a general feel. The virtual open days have subject specific presentations and one can usually put questions to the speaker and to current students.

e.g.Warwick and Bath have just had open days, but also have more coming up - Warwick on October 23rd and 24th iirc and Bath on 27th and 28th. However, if he is interested in Durham and hasn't 'been there' already, there isn't another open day before next June now. A cynical thought is that they get so many of their applications from those who would use them as a sort of default backup to Oxbridge that there are too few people who won't need to have their application in by October 15th for the university to bother with. But I'm sure I'm probably wrong there .

_________________
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.Groucho Marx

This is not specific for computer science at all but my dd has just applied for university (current year 13) and this is what she found helpful.
This website:
https://www.theuniguide.co.uk/
used to be called Which? Uni. She found it really helpful to draw up a "longlist" of universities that she thought might work for her - she put in her course and her likely grades and then it gives a list of all universities which offer that subject with similar grade requirements.
Once she had the longlist she went on all their websites and looked at the content of that degree subject at those universities (I'm not sure about computer science but she found that the courses she was looking at were really quite different between different institutions - I'm guess computer science will also have a lot of differences).
This then resulted in a shorter list. She then looked at the universities themselves (online - this was all over the year 12 Christmas holidays when we assumed we would be able to go to real open days! - she just went on their websites) and decided on things she liked (city university) and didn't want (campus university). This caused some significant decision making eg did the fact that she loved the look of the course at Exeter outweigh the fact that it was on a campus? (the answer was no).
She then came up with 6 universities which we planned to visit. We then did the virtual open days for all 6 of those when open days were cancelled.
(The first part of this she did on her own; we did as many of the open days together as we could as that had always been the plan - weekends away to visit them).
I don't think she would have engaged so well with the virtual open days a whole year in advance - it feels so much more real now and felt so much more remote to her a year ago. But of course some children might want to go to them early.
That website above was the best thing we found in managing to get from "100 universities offer this course, how do I start to narrow it down?" to "OK I have a sense of what I am looking for.")
Hope that helps.

Thanks Toadmum and loobylou. DS has registered to few open days now. This will give him some idea..

My DS is in year 13 and has just submitted his UCAS application to study Computer Science. He was struggling to get a feel for Universities through the virtual summer open days, so when our holiday abroad was cancelled in the school holidays due to COVID we turned it into an opportunity to visit a number of universities and cities on his list, which really helped him to decide. He has applied to Cambridge, Imperial College, Durham, Bath and Leeds. He has researched everything himself, but the ones he has selected are all on this list;

https://www.thecompleteuniversityguide. ... er-science

I hope this helps!

League tables are very flawed - it's impossible to replicate their methodology.

It is not a good way of choosing a university. Imperial has poor student satisfaction for example.

League tables are very flawed - it's impossible to replicate their methodology.

It is not a good way of choosing a university. Imperial has poor student satisfaction for example.

I agree league tables are flawed. They help choose a Uni amongst many other pieces of information. It is so hard for for kids this year not being able to look around universities. Imperial is fantastic for Computer Science and I know of some very satisfied Computer Scientists there. My DS applied to Cambridge, Warwick, Durham, Southampton and Loughborough last year and we also looked at Bristol, Imperial (too close to home), Birmingham and Nottingham as well. I have given some feedback to the OP, but happy to answer any other questions people may have.