A few years ago I did a crude ranking of winners and runners-up, derived from Wikipedia, of the UK quiz show University Challenge, to show that British university rankings were becoming too complex and sophisticated. Overall it was not too dissimilar to national rankings and certainly more reasonable than the citations indicator of the THE world rankings. At the top was Oxford, followed by Cambridge and then Manchester. The first two were actually represented by constituent colleges. Manchester is probably underrepresented because it was expelled for several years after its team tried to sabotage a show by giving answers like Marx, Trotsky and Lenin to all or most of the questions, striking a blow against bourgeois intellectual hegemony or something.
Recently Paul Greatrix of Wonk HE did a list of the ten dumbest rankings ever. The University Challenge ranking was ninth because everybody knows who will win. He has a point. Cambridge and Oxford colleges are disproportionately likely to be in the finals.
Inevitably there is muttering about not enough women and ethnic minorities on the teams. The Guardian complains that only 22 % of this years contestants were women and none of the finalists. The difference between the number of finalists and the number of competitors might, however, suggest that there is a bias in favour of women in the processes of team selection.
Anyway, here is a suggestion for anyone concerned that the university challenge teams don't look like Britain or the world. Give each competing university or college the opportunity, if they wish, to submit two teams, one of which will be composed of women and/or aggrieved minorities and see what happens.
James Thompson at the Unz Review has some interesting comments. It seems that general knowledge is closely associated with IQ and to a lesser extent with openness to experience. This is in fact a test of IQ aka intelligence aka general mental ability.
So it's not such a dumb ranking after all.
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