Norrington Table - History of The Norrington Table

History of The Norrington Table

Contrary to popular belief, the Norrington Table was not created in 1962 by Sir Arthur Norrington, who was then president of Trinity College. Norrington did not invent the idea of producing a table of the results of Oxford Colleges. Rather, he suggested a refinement to the weightings given to results by a pre-existing table. Norrington's scoring system was suggested in 1963 and abandoned after 1985, owing to changes in the Oxford examination system.

On 5 September 1963, Norrington had a letter published in The Times, in which he objected to the table that their correspondent had invented two days earlier (3 September 1963, p. 12). The Times had previously published a table of Oxford Colleges' results in 1962 (28 August 1962, p. 5).

Norrington wrote: "Your Correspondent has analysed the final examination results this year and gives an order of merit, among the first colleges, based on the percentage of Firsts and Seconds. This, in effect, is the same as basing it on the percentage of Thirds, and gives it no extra credit for Firsts. College A, for example, that gets 20 Firsts, 60 Seconds, and 20 Thirds scores less by this method than College B that gets no Firsts, 81 Seconds and 19 Thirds, but surely A has, in reality, done much better than B. A better result, I submit, is obtained by a points system in which a First scores more than a second and a Second more than a Third. If you make the points 3, 2, and 1 respectively and calculate what percentage of its "possible" each college has secured, you will find that College A, with 200 points out of 300, has scored 66.67 per cent, and B, with 181, only 60 per cent. This method of calculation will be found to promote Magdalen and Merton, which come surprisingly low in your Correspondent's order." (5 September 1963, p. 13)

In 1986, when Oxford for the first time split Second Class honours into Upper Seconds and Lower Seconds, The Times unilaterally adopted the Tompkins system for classifying colleges' results. Tompkins gives more weight to a First class degree: five points for a First, three for a 2.1, two for a 2.2, and one for a Third. This system was invented in 1981 by Peter Tompkins, of Birkenhead, as a method of classifying the results of Cambridge colleges, and a table compiled by Tompkins on this basis was published on 28 August by The Times (28 Aug 1981, p. 10) alongside a table using the Norrington scoring system, which had been compiled by the Cambridge Evening News. The Tompkins system became the preferred one for Cambridge results, and has prevailed for Oxford results, too, since 1986.