If you want to brag about going to a Russell Group uni, but you can’t be bothered to study very hard, then you’re in luck! Data from the National Student Survey has revealed how intellectually stimulating UK uni students really find their degrees. Here are the Russell Group unis with the easiest courses in 2025, according to students.
By the way, 85.5 per cent of UK uni students said they found their courses intellectually stimulating. All the Russell Group unis scored higher than this benchmark. So Russell Group uni courses are genuinely harder work than average.
Unsurprisingly, Oxbridge students found their courses the most intellectually stimulating out of all the Russell Group unis. Slightly more University of Cambridge students thought their degrees were academically challenging than the University of Oxford students did. I will be taking this is definitive evidence that Cambridge is more intellectual than Oxford, please and thank you.
If you want to know what staff think about Russell Group unis instead, here’s which Russell Group unis your lecturers think have the best reputations.
Over 357,000 students gave feedback in the 2025 National Student Survey. The percentages in the list below refer to the proportion of students at that uni who gave a positive response to the question “How often is the course intellectually stimulating?”. So the higher that percentage is, the more academically rigorous the uni’s courses are. The lower the percentage is, the easier students found those courses.
So, here are the Russell Group unis with the easiest courses in 2025, according to students:
24. University of Cambridge – 97.4 per cent
23. University of Oxford – 96.4 per cent
Well, you don’t go to Oxford to party
22. Imperial College London – 93.8 per cent
21. London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) – 93.6 per cent
20. University of Warwick – 92.6 per cent
19. Durham University – 92.2 per cent
18. University of Bristol – 91.4 per cent
17. University of Sheffield – 90.4 per cent
16. University of Glasgow – 89.7 per cent
=14. University of Birmingham – 89.5 per cent
=14. University College London (UCL) – 89.5 per cent
=12. University of Exeter – 89.3 per cent
=12. University of York – 89.3 per cent
11. University of Liverpool – 89.1 per cent
10. University of Edinburgh – 89.0 per cent
9. University of Nottingham – 88.7 per cent
8. University of Southampton – 88.5 per cent
7. University of Manchester – 88.3 per cent
A rare image of Manchester students in a library and not in a club
6. King’s College London (KCL) – 88.1 per cent
=4. University of Leeds – 87.9 per cent
=4. Queen’s University Belfast – 87.9 per cent
3. Cardiff University – 87.6 per cent
=1. Newcastle University – 85.8 per cent
=1. Queen Mary University of London – 85.8 per cent
For more like this, like The Tab on Facebook.
