Medical School Rankings
Are you considering which medical schools to apply to? You’ve come to the right place – this page will provide you with up to date medical school rankings!
These medical school rankings are created using a variety of factors (for example, graduate employability or student satisfaction). These factors are added up to create an average, which produces an overall score for the university. The aim of this page is to compile these scores to provide a table of the top medical schools across the UK and internationally in 2019.
Universities score differently in UK medical school rankings according to the different factors, and these vary from year to year.
It’s important to choose the university which is right for your requirements. This may mean the best medical school for you scores highly in facilities spend, or degree completion, or graduate prospects – or all three!
Want to compare different medical schools? Try our Medical School Comparison Tool!
Compare different UK medical schools
Medical School Rankings UK: Universities
Here are the top UK universities, which we compiled by combining the Guardian‘s rankings with Complete University Guide’s rankings for 2019.
Please note that this does not include the newer medical schools (such as Sunderland or Edge Hill University) as these programmes have not yet started.
You can rank the top medical schools according to different factors (for example, you could filter by the Guardian score, or by student satisfaction):
| Medical School | Complete University Guide Overall Score (out of 100) | Student Satisfaction (out of 5 - Complete University Guide) | Graduate Prospects (out of 100 - Complete University Guide) | Guardian Score (out of 100) |
| Oxford | 100 | 4.47 | 99 | 99.8 |
| Cambridge | 100 | 3.81 | 99 | 100 |
| Glasgow | 99.8 | 4.22 | 99 | 87.1 |
| Swansea | 99.4 | 4.19 | 99 | 94.8 |
| Imperial | 98.9 | 4.08 | 100 | 86.7 |
| Dundee | 98.8 | 4.19 | 100 | 89.8 |
| Barts | 98.7 | 4.30 | 100 | 89.2 |
| UCL | 98.5 | 3.90 | 100 | 89.9 |
| Edinburgh | 98.4 | 3.95 | 98 | 91.1 |
| Newcastle | 98.2 | 4.26 | 100 | 92.1 |
| Keele | 97.9 | 4.25 | 100 | 85.7 |
| Aberdeen | 97.9 | 4.24 | 100 | 92.2 |
| Bristol | 97.9 | 4.20 | 100 | 77.8 |
| Exeter | 97.5 | 4.05 | 100 | 77.4 |
| Sheffield | 97.3 | 4.75 | 100 | 67.2 |
| Brighton & Sussex | 97.2 | 4.58 | 100 | 87.8 |
| Cardiff | 97.0 | 3.92 | 100 | 72 |
| King's College London | 96.9 | 3.47 | 99 | 44.2 |
| St Andrews | 96.9 | 4.43 | 98 | 79.3 |
| Leeds | 96.7 | 4.25 | 100 | 79.4 |
| Birmingham | 96.7 | 4.11 | 100 | 79.3 |
| Manchester | 96.7 | 3.84 | 100 | 63.3 |
| Nottingham | 96.7 | 3.61 | 100 | 64.3 |
| UEA | 96.6 | 4.12 | 100 | 74.4 |
| Queen's, Belfast | 96.3 | 4.16 | 100 | 66.3 |
| Hull York | 96.2 | 3.98 | 100 | 61.2 |
| Southampton | 96.1 | 4.00 | 100 | 72.4 |
| Leicester | 96.0 | 3.82 | 100 | 73.1 |
| Warwick | 96.0 | 3.63 | 100 | 38.6 |
| Plymouth | 95.9 | 4.07 | 100 | 73.7 |
| Liverpool | 95.8 | 4.20 | 100 | 59.7 |
| St George's, University of London | 95.4 | 3.95 | 100 | 70.4 |
| Lancaster | 95.4 | 4.25 | n/a | 64.3 |
Medical School Rankings UK: How Are They Judged?
The above table is ranked using the following criteria to measure the best medical schools:
- Complete University Guide overall score
- Student satisfaction – borrowed from the National Student Survey
- Graduate prospects – a measure of graduate employability
- Guardian score – the Guardian have also created their own way of ranking universities which is largely based on student perspective
However, top medical schools are also ranked with the below criteria too to give them an overall score on the Complete University Guide:
- Entry requirements – the average UCAS tariff score from undergraduates
- Research assessment – a measure of the quality of research at the university, taken from the Research Excellence Framework
- Research intensity – a measure of the proportion of staff involved in research
- Student-staff ratio – the number of students per staff member
- Academic services spend – expenditure per student on academic services (for example, library or computer facilities)
- Facilities spend – expenditure on staff and student services
- Good honours – the number of students receiving first or upper second class honours degrees
- Degree completion – the number of students who complete their degree courses
Wondering which kind of med school course you would suit? Take the quiz!
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Medical School Rankings: International Universities
International universities use a different ranking system to the UK to list their best medical schools, and this is a lot more difficult to find online.
Top Universities ranks them according to an overall score, as well as by academic and employer reputation – though it is unclear how these are assessed. The table below shows how international universities score in medical school rankings:
| Institution | Location |
| Harvard University | United States |
| Stanford University | United States |
| Johns Hopkins University | United States |
| Karolinska Institutet | Sweden |
| University of California LA | Los Angeles, US |
| Yale University | United States |
| Massachussetts Institute of Technology | United States |
| University of California | San Francisco, US |
| University of Toronto | Toronto, Canada |
| Columbia University | United States |
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