what happend with sheffield uni. at the guardian ... I remmber it was 16 or17 last year now it is all the way down to 51
I mean this is crazy am sure it is better than half of the universities above .. still now I regret not accepting birmingham's offer !!
by the way am doing LLM there at the moment

I suspect that says as much (if not more) about the way the rankings are compiled (and not just by the Guardian) than the institution. Sheffield is not the only institution to have 'yoyo-ed' over the years and I'm not sure whether the change in rankings is reflected in the students' experience from one year to the next. You might want to consider by looking at the criteria that the newspaper use whether its assessment is the most relevant for your purposes and remember that most if not all of the assessment is based on the undergraduate student body rather than the postgraduate.