FOI_25-252 Mathematics degree classifications

Date of response: 10 September 2025

We have now considered your request of 22 August 2025 for the following information:

I am writing to request information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000. I would be grateful if you could provide a breakdown of the degree classifications awarded by your university for undergraduate BSc Mathematics programmes over the past five academic years.

For each year, please include the number of students awarded:

• First Class Honours

• Upper Second Class Honours (2:1)

• Lower Second Class Honours (2:2)

• Third Class Honours

• Any other classifications (e.g. Pass, Fail, or unclassified)

Can you break the data down by gender too please?

Our response:

Please see accompanying document, our ref: FOI_25-252 Appendix A.

Values marked fewer than five <5: Section 40 (2) exemption explanation:

On this occasion, it is not possible to provide all the requested information. The Act contains several exemptions that allow public authorities to withhold certain information from release. We have applied the following exemption to part of your request.

We can confirm that the University does hold this data, and we believe that the requested information, constitutes the personal data of individuals, as defined by Article 4(1) of the UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). However, due to the small numbers involved, we consider these details are exempt from disclosure under Section 40(2) of the FOI Act.

We believe that disclosure this data would be contrary to the requirements of Article 5(1)(a) of the GDPR; namely that information must be processed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner. These individuals would have no expectation that this information would be made publicly available, and we have not identified a lawful basis that would allow or require us to disclose this information. To ensure that we do not inadvertently release personal data in this response or in combination with other publicly available data, we have replaced all values between 1 and 4 in relation to the number of individuals with the value ‘<5’.