A screen dump of the full web page is available in appendix 1. 2. The student found this website very useful and provided the majority of information needed to complete the investigation. The student noted however that the entry requirements for one of the local Universities was not provided. The student therefore visited the website of this particular University i. e.
Queens University Belfast (www. qub. ac. uk) A screen dump of the full web page is available in appendix 1.
3. However the student does not wish to pursue his studies in Northern Ireland.To explore Universities in other regions of the United Kingdom that offers this type of course the student decided to use Google's Complex Search Facility (www. google.
com) to search for necessary criteria and entry requirements. A screen dump of the full web page showing search criteria is available in appendix 1. 4. To obtain details of University ratings the student consulted the Sunday Time University Guide. This provided information about 123 Universities in the U. K.
Each university was given an overall rating based upon the other seven rating.The student used this rating together with the teaching rating to identify specific University course of choice. (See spreadsheet) Finally, Due to the amount of data that the student needed to gather, a flowchart was designed to ensure no errors were made in this process. (See appendix 1. 5) The student also used a graphical source from the DENI website (www. deni.
org. uk). (See appendix). The source showed key trends such as the fact that the standards of grades of students leaving schools are increasing; this therefore means that there is more competition as higher levels of students go to university.
The student was also able to notice from the source that the amount of students with GCSE's from grade A* to C has increased also during the period of 1988 to 2000. Students achieving grades of A* to C has increased from 38,000 to over 50,000 showing a considerable increase. He also noticed that the amount of students with 2 or more A-levels has increased steadily during the time 1988 to 2000. over the 12 years the amount of students leaving school with 2 or more A-levels has increased from around 20,000 to around 31,000.
