The story, the data, the people
If you're writing about UK higher education, university transparency, or how students actually pick modules, here's what you need to know.
The story in one paragraph
UK universities are required to disclose grade distribution data under the Freedom of Information Act, but they don't publish it themselves. GradeHack is filing FOI requests at scale across UK institutions, normalising the responses, and turning them into a public-interest dataset that helps students choose modules with their eyes open. We started in 2018 with a five-module pilot at Exeter; we're scaling it up nationally.
What's newsworthy
- The data is striking. Modules on the same degree at the same university produce wildly different outcomes — first-rates ranging from 11% to 41% in one Computer Science programme alone.
- The dataset is unique. Nobody else has assembled multi-year, multi-university, module-level UK grade data in normalised form.
- The transparency angle. Universities are required by law to disclose this under FOI but actively avoid surfacing it. The FOI archive is public.
- Student outcomes. Pilot results showed measurable grade uplifts for users; we're running this again at a much larger scale.
What we're happy to share
Under embargo, we can share aggregated insights from the dataset, the methodology document, and access to the founding team. We can't share raw percentages on individual modules in a way that bypasses our suppression policy.
Get in touch
Press requests are read same-day. We can usually turn around a substantive response within 48 hours, sooner if there's a deadline.