Pembroke tops Cambridge colleges league

Pembroke College, alma mater of Ted Hughes, Peter Cook and Clive James, has been ranked the best college for academic performance at Cambridge University.

Cambridge's third oldest college leads the Tompkins table of exam results for the first time in the 22-year history of the rankings, knocking Christ's College, which was first for the previous three years, into fourth place.

The table, which is compiled for The Independent by Peter Tompkins, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, is used by sixth-form students to help them choose a college and is closely monitored by the colleges themselves. Mr Tompkins first produced the table "out of curiosity" when he was a maths undergraduate at Trinity College in 1981.

Overall, fewer Cambridge undergraduates achieved first-class degrees in this summer's exams – 21.7 per cent – compared with 22.0 per cent in 2001, his analysis showed.

Pembroke College had the highest percentage of first-class degrees, at 30.4 per cent. Dr Mark Wormald, the college's senior tutor, said he was very pleased with the success.

"It's important not to read too much into these statistics, although we are of course delighted to have come top," he said. "Over the last decade we have been steadily improving our performance within the university, investing time and money in recruiting the best students from a wide range of backgrounds and making sure that they have the support they need to succeed."

The number of Cambridge students who achieved third-class degrees fell to just 3 per cent this summer.

The two all-women colleges, New Hall and Newnham, achieved the lowest proportion of first-class degrees and languished at, or near, the bottom of the table. The biggest losers included St John's, which slipped from 4th to 11th position; Fitzwilliam, which dropped from 13th to 20th, and Robinson, which fell from 14th to 21st.

The largest improvements were shown by King's College, which jumped from 21st to 14th place, and Magdalene, which moved from 22nd into 15th position.