Auditing University Rankings

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on a meeting of the International Rankings Expert Group's (IREG) Observatory on Academic Ranking and Excellence.

The Organisation has set up a mechanism to audit the various university rankings.

"The audit project, which he [Gero Federkeil] is helping to manage, will be based closely on IREG's principles, which emphasize clarity and openness in the purposes and goals of rankings, the design and weighting of indicators, the collection and processing of data, and the presentation of results.

"We all say that rankings should aim at delivering transparency about higher-education institutions, but we think there should be transparency about rankings too," Mr. Federkeil said. The audit process could eventually give rise to an IREG quality label, which would amount to an identification of trustworthy rankings, thereby enhancing the credibility of rankings and improving their quality, Mr. Federkeil said.

At the Berlin meeting last week, Mr. Federkeil and Ying Cheng, of the Center for World-Class Universities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, which produces the best-known and most influential global ranking of universities, outlined the proposed methodology and procedure for the audit. The IREG executive committee will nominate audit teams consisting of three to five people. The chair of each team must not have any formal affiliation with a ranking organization, and at least one member of the audit team must be a member of the IREG executive committee. Audits will be based on self-reported data as well as possible on-site visits, and each full audit is expected to take about five months to complete."

The executive committee of IREG includes Liu Nian Cai from Shanghai Rankings Consultancy, Bob Morse from US News & World Report and Gero Federkeil from CHE, the German ranking body.

Members of the Observatory include HEEACT (Taiwan), the Kazakhstan and Slovak ranking agencies and QS Intelligence Agency.

Would anybody like to guess who will be the first to be audited?