What happened to Macquarie?

In 2005 Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, was ranked 67th on the THES university rankings. In 2006 it slipped a bit to 82nd place, even though its score rose on every section except for citations per faculty. This is not in itself a problem since it is possible that changes at the top could cause nearly everybody to go up if 100 represented a smaller number.

What is surprising is that Macquarie got a score of 100 for the international faculty component, compared with 53 in 2005.

We should point out that in 2005 Australian universities received the same or almost the same score for this component. Thirteen were given a score of 53, two a score of 54, one a score of 52 and one 33. I would guess that the four different scores are probably data entry errors since they all differ from the majority by a single digit. This makes it more plausible that some of the more surprising changes in 2006 may have resulted from similar errors.

THES indicated that in 2005 in some cases they had to make an estimate for some data so presumably the 2005 figures represent an estimate of the proportion of international faculty for the whole of Australia.

The doubling of Macquarie's score may not then be so implausible. Perhaps the 2005 figure was actually far too low. Also, it is possible Macquarie's 100 may represent a lower figure than the 100 that was given to the City University of Hong Kong in 2005.

Even so, it does look like a surprisningly high score for Macquarie. In 2005 City University of Hong Kong had 55.47% international faculty, which was converted into 100. In 2006 they had a score of 75. So if their score had remained the same, Macquarie's would have been 73.96 %. In 2006, second-ranking LSE had, according to its web site, 44% international faculty, which would equal a score of 89.

This means that Macquarie would have an international faculty of 48 to 74 %. The first number might be plausible but the second seems too high. But does Macquarie have such a score? I have spent a few hours trawling the internet to find anything about the proportion of international faculty at Macquarie or other Australian universities without success.

Is there anybody out there who knows anything about the proportion of international faculty at Macquarie?

Is it possible that we have another data entry error here that has affected all the scores in that section?