News about ranking

There has been a lot of ranking-related activity over the last few days.

• Phil Baty of Times Higher Education and the QS team of John O'Leary, Martin Ince, Nunzio Quacquarelli and Ben Sowter have given presentations at the British Council Going Global 4 conference in London. Phil Baty was apologetic over the flaws of the old THE-QS rankings while the QS team saw no reason change.

• The Economist has an article "Leagues Apart" that briefly reviews the development of international university rankings. Observations include the volatility of the rankings. Perhaps inevitably the example chosen is the fall of LSE after QS introduced standardised scores which helped universities that produced more citations.

• Phil Baty in THE comments on the problems of assessing the quality of teaching in unversities.