Sunday, November 11, 2007

Malaysian Universities

Since THES has suggested that Malaysian and Singaporean universities suffered in this year's rankings because respondents were not allowed to vote for their own institutions and since this is obviously not true of the Singaporean universities, who got scores of 100 and 84 for the "peer review", I think it would be a good idea to wait a bit before making assumptions about the cause of the apparent decline of Malaysian universities. It is not totally impossible that QS has made another error or errors.

2 comments:

Alejandro Pisanty said...

It does seem that the rule of not counting votes for the academics' own institutions in the QS survey that feeds the THES ranking has effects in developing countries which are different from those in developed ones. Simply put, it is nearly impossible for a researcher in a developing country not to assign importance to an institution when it is one of very few in the country, or one which covers a field much larger than any other in the country. For historical reasons this is often the case and thus the design of the survey and its incorporation into the rankings may break down. This hypothesis needs research to be done, which in turn requires being able to look at the innards of the actual survey used.

Anonymous said...

NUS suffered from poor score in staff-student ratio, not the inability to vote for itself.