- Joined
- Jan 27, 2016
- Messages
- 648
- Points
- 28
First impressions suggest it is almost laughably inaccurate. UC Berkeley at #27? This is the same university that is affiliated with 91 Nobel Laureates, 13 Fields Medals, 23 Turing Awards and 16 elements of the Periodic Table. The rest of the ranking seems similarly strange as well; NUS and NTU ranked right alongside or higher than Princeton, Cornell, Yale, Columbia and Johns Hopkins?
Is it just my Anglo-American bias speaking? I know these universities have made rapid strides in funding and encouraging cutting edge research, so perhaps it’s inevitable that they’ve caught up and surpassed the more well known Ivy League universities. That is obviously partly the case, but after digging around for a bit, there seems to be a whole host of articles about the flawed methodology and downright shady practices of the QS organisation.
Firstly, take a look at flaws in the methodology:
● 10% of the score is based on the % of international students and faculty. This has absolutely no relation to research or teaching, and favors universities in smaller countries like the UK, Switzerland and Singapore over those in the US. 10% might seem like a small number, but when all these universities score almost the same in the major metrics, it is small factors like these that create all the differences in rankings.
● 50% of the score comes from reputation surveys from Academics and Employers. The methodology of these surveys has come under immense scrutiny - awarding incentives for completing surveys, letting survey takers recommend the survey to others, surveying random academics rather than the established leaders in the field, etc.
● Less commonly spoken about is the geographic distribution of the survey respondents: 7.3% of respondents come from the UK (Pop: ~65 Mil), 3.7% from Malaysia (Pop: ~20 Mil), 0.8% from Singapore (Pop: ~5Mil), 4.0% from Australia (Pop: ~20 Mil), and just 10% from the USA (Pop: ~ 320 Mil)! 15% of survey respondents are administrators and teaching assistants, not academics! Looks like it’s no surprise that UK, Singapore and Australian universities seem to be higher ranked than they might be.
More at 2018 QS University Rankings: almost laughably inaccurate
Is it just my Anglo-American bias speaking? I know these universities have made rapid strides in funding and encouraging cutting edge research, so perhaps it’s inevitable that they’ve caught up and surpassed the more well known Ivy League universities. That is obviously partly the case, but after digging around for a bit, there seems to be a whole host of articles about the flawed methodology and downright shady practices of the QS organisation.
Firstly, take a look at flaws in the methodology:
● 10% of the score is based on the % of international students and faculty. This has absolutely no relation to research or teaching, and favors universities in smaller countries like the UK, Switzerland and Singapore over those in the US. 10% might seem like a small number, but when all these universities score almost the same in the major metrics, it is small factors like these that create all the differences in rankings.
● 50% of the score comes from reputation surveys from Academics and Employers. The methodology of these surveys has come under immense scrutiny - awarding incentives for completing surveys, letting survey takers recommend the survey to others, surveying random academics rather than the established leaders in the field, etc.
● Less commonly spoken about is the geographic distribution of the survey respondents: 7.3% of respondents come from the UK (Pop: ~65 Mil), 3.7% from Malaysia (Pop: ~20 Mil), 0.8% from Singapore (Pop: ~5Mil), 4.0% from Australia (Pop: ~20 Mil), and just 10% from the USA (Pop: ~ 320 Mil)! 15% of survey respondents are administrators and teaching assistants, not academics! Looks like it’s no surprise that UK, Singapore and Australian universities seem to be higher ranked than they might be.
More at 2018 QS University Rankings: almost laughably inaccurate
