The Good News

There are some worthwhile improvements in the new THE World University Rankings.

First the weighting given to the subjective opinion survey has been reduced although probably not by enough. Very sensibly, the survey asked respondents to evaluate teaching as well as research.

The task ahead for THE now is to refine the sample of respondents and the questions they are invited to answer. It would make sense to exclude those with a non-university affiliation from answering questions about teaching. Similarly, there ought to be some way of eliciting the views of university teachers who do not do research, perhaps by some sort of rigorously validated sign up system. Something like this might also be developed to discover the views of students, at least graduate students.

The weighting given to international students has been reduced from five to two per cent.

There is a substantial weighting for a mixed bag of teaching indicators, including the survey. Some of these are questionable though such as the ratio of doctoral to undergraduate students.

For most indicators, the present rankings represent a degree of progress.

The problem with these rankings is the Citations Indicator, which has produced results that, to say the least, are bizarre.