John Fitzgerald of Swinburne University of Technology has written an article in the Journal of Political Risk that argues that Western universities should boycott, that is not participate in or refer to, the Shanghai rankings in order to show opposition to the current authoritarian trend in Chinese higher education.
There seems a bit of selective indignation at work here. China is hardly the only country in the world with authoritarian governments, ideologically docile universities, or crackdowns on dissidents. Nearly everywhere in Africa, most of the Middle East, Russia, much of Eastern Europe, and perhaps India would seem as guilty as China, if not more so.
American and other Western universities themselves are in danger of becoming one party institutions based on an obsessive hatred of Trump or Brexit, a pervasive cult of "diversity", political tests for admission, appointment and promotion, and periodic media or physical attacks on dissenters or those who associate with dissenters.
Perhaps academics should boycott the THE or other rankings to protest the treatment by Cambridge University of Noah Carl or Jordan Peterson?
One way of resisting the wave of repression, according to Professor Fitzgerald, is to "no longer reference the ARWU rankings or participate in the Shanghai Jiaotong rankings process which risks spreading the Chinese Communist Party's university model globally. Universities that continue to participate or reference the Shanghai rankings should be tasked by their faculty and alumni to explain why they are failing to uphold the principles of free inquiry and institutional autonomy as fiercely as Xi Jinping is undermining them."
It is hard to see what Fitzgerald means by not participating in the Shanghai rankings. The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) uses publicly available data from western sources, the Web of Science, Nature, Science, the Clarivate Analytics list of Highly Cited Researchers, and Nobel and Fields awards. Universities cannot avoid participating in them. They can denounce and condemn the rankings until their faces turn bright purple but they cannot opt out. They are ranked by ARWU whether they like it or not.
As for referencing, presumably citing the Shanghai rankings or celebrating university achievements there, Fitzgerald's proposals would seem self defeating. The rankings actually understate the achievements of leading Chinese universities. In the latest ARWU Tsinghua University and Peking University are ranked 43rd and 53rd. The QS World University Rankings puts them 16th and 22nd and the THE world rankings 23rd and 24th.
If anyone wanted to protest the rise of Chinese universities they should turn to the QS and THE rankings where they do well because of reputation, income (THE), and publications in high status journals. It is also possible to opt out of the THE rankings simply by not submitting data.
If oppressive policies did affect the quality of research produced by Chinese universities this would be more likely to show up in the Shanghai rankings through the departure of highly cited researchers or declining submissions to Nature or Science than in the THE or QS rankings where a decline would be obscured if reputation scores continued to hold steady.
Fitzgerald's proposals are pointless and self defeating and ascribe a greater influence to rankings than they actually have.
Discussion and analysis of international university rankings and topics related to the quality of higher education. Anyone wishing to contact Richard Holmes without worrying about ending up in comments can go to rjholmes2000@yahoo.com
Sunday, January 19, 2020
Thursday, January 16, 2020
The decline of standardised testing
Over the last few years there has been a trend in American higher education to reduce the significance of standardised tests -- SAT, ACT, GRE, GMAT, LSAT -- in university admissions. A large number of institutions have gone test optional, meaning that it is up to students whether or not they submit their scores. Those who do not submit will not be rejected but will be assessed by other criteria such as high school grades and ranks, recommendations, social awareness, grit, coping with adversity, leadership, sports, membership of protected groups, and so on.
Most test optional schools are small liberal arts colleges but recently they were joined by the University of Chicago, an elite university by any standards.
Going test optional has a number of advantages. Students with low test scores will be more likely to apply and that will lower the percentage of applicants admitted which will make the universities look more selective. It could also help with the rankings which may at first sight seem a bit of a paradox. US News has declared that for the America's Best Colleges rankings up to 25% of applicants can withhold their SAT or ACT scores without the college being penalised.
It seems that if universities can arrange to admit 75% of applicants wholly or partly on the basis of their test scores and allow another quarter to be admitted because of a "holistic" assessment then they may suffer a measurable fall in the average academic ability of their students but not enough to get in trouble with the rankers or to undermine their reputation for academic excellence.
It seems likely that US News will continue to adjust its rankings to accommodate the test optional trend, Recently, for example, the ranking of online graduate education courses lowered the threshold for full credit for quantitative and verbal GRE scores from 75% to 25% of admitted students. The justification for this is that "although many ranked programs with selective admissions made use of GRE scores in limited circumstances very often submitting these scores was optional or waived for applicants."
This will lead to the problem of a substantial number of students being admitted with significantly lower test scores or without taking the tests and so the gap between the most and least able students is likely to widen. Many of those admitted without submitting scores will suffer a serious blow to their self respect as they go from being the academic super stars of their high school or undergraduate program to ranking at the bottom of any assessed test or assignment.
There will accordingly be pressure on colleges and graduates schools to relax grading standards, give credit for group work, allow students to repeat courses, mandate contextualised assessment policies, hold instructors responsible for the performance of students. Faculty who talk about the decline in standards or disparities in achievement will be disciplined and ostracised.
The significant thing about standardised tests is that they correlate quite highly with general intelligence or cognitive ability and also with each other. They played a significant role in the growth of American higher education and research in the twentieth century and the transformation of the Ivy league from a place for producing literate and well behaved young gentlemen into intellectual powerhouses that contributed to the economic and scientific dominance of the US in the second half of the twentieth century.
They are also a good predictor of academic performance although perhaps not quite as good by themselves as high school grades which are influenced by conscientiousness and social conformity.
It now seems likely that there will be increasing pressure to get rid of standardised tests altogether. In California there is a court case in process to make it illegal to used tests for university admissions and Carol Christ, Chancellor of the University of California (UC) Berkeley, has declared in favour of abolition.
Getting rid of tests will mean getting rid of an objective measure of students' intelligence and academic ability. Grades are, as noted above, a slightly better predictor overall of academic performance but there are contexts where tests can add vital information to the admission process. Grade inflation throughout US high schools is creating a large number of students with perfect or near perfect grades but with huge differences in cognitive skills. Without tests there will be no way of distinguishing the truly capable from the diligently mediocre or the aggressively conformist.
If UC does stop using the SAT or ACT for admissions it is unlikely that it will institute a policy of open admissions, at least not yet. It is more probable they it will shift the criteria for selection to high school grades, teachers' recommendations, group membership, and unsupervised personal essays. The consequences of selection though inflatable high school grades and other subjective measures will almost certainly be a significant decline in the average cognitive skills of students at currently selective universities.
American universities will probably become more representative of the ethnic, gender and racial structure of America or the world, more conscientious, more extroverted, more socially aware. Perhaps this will be compensation for the decline in cognitive ability.
It is unlikely that the levelling process will end there. In the years to come there will very probably be demands that universities stop using high school grades or admission essays or anything else that shows a social or racial gap. Studies will be cited showing that wealthy white parents help their children with homework or drive them to volunteering activities or pay for sports equipment or get professional advice about their diversity essays.
Ultimately there will be a situation where American universities see a noticeable decline in the academic and cognitive ability of students and graduates in comparison with China and the Chinese diaspora, Japan, Korea, Russia and Eastern Europe and maybe India. Almost certainly this will be attributed by educational experts to the stinginess of federal and state authorities.
Perhaps there will come another Sputnik moment when America realises that it has fallen behind its competitors. If so it will probably be too late.
Most test optional schools are small liberal arts colleges but recently they were joined by the University of Chicago, an elite university by any standards.
Going test optional has a number of advantages. Students with low test scores will be more likely to apply and that will lower the percentage of applicants admitted which will make the universities look more selective. It could also help with the rankings which may at first sight seem a bit of a paradox. US News has declared that for the America's Best Colleges rankings up to 25% of applicants can withhold their SAT or ACT scores without the college being penalised.
It seems that if universities can arrange to admit 75% of applicants wholly or partly on the basis of their test scores and allow another quarter to be admitted because of a "holistic" assessment then they may suffer a measurable fall in the average academic ability of their students but not enough to get in trouble with the rankers or to undermine their reputation for academic excellence.
It seems likely that US News will continue to adjust its rankings to accommodate the test optional trend, Recently, for example, the ranking of online graduate education courses lowered the threshold for full credit for quantitative and verbal GRE scores from 75% to 25% of admitted students. The justification for this is that "although many ranked programs with selective admissions made use of GRE scores in limited circumstances very often submitting these scores was optional or waived for applicants."
This will lead to the problem of a substantial number of students being admitted with significantly lower test scores or without taking the tests and so the gap between the most and least able students is likely to widen. Many of those admitted without submitting scores will suffer a serious blow to their self respect as they go from being the academic super stars of their high school or undergraduate program to ranking at the bottom of any assessed test or assignment.
There will accordingly be pressure on colleges and graduates schools to relax grading standards, give credit for group work, allow students to repeat courses, mandate contextualised assessment policies, hold instructors responsible for the performance of students. Faculty who talk about the decline in standards or disparities in achievement will be disciplined and ostracised.
The significant thing about standardised tests is that they correlate quite highly with general intelligence or cognitive ability and also with each other. They played a significant role in the growth of American higher education and research in the twentieth century and the transformation of the Ivy league from a place for producing literate and well behaved young gentlemen into intellectual powerhouses that contributed to the economic and scientific dominance of the US in the second half of the twentieth century.
They are also a good predictor of academic performance although perhaps not quite as good by themselves as high school grades which are influenced by conscientiousness and social conformity.
It now seems likely that there will be increasing pressure to get rid of standardised tests altogether. In California there is a court case in process to make it illegal to used tests for university admissions and Carol Christ, Chancellor of the University of California (UC) Berkeley, has declared in favour of abolition.
Getting rid of tests will mean getting rid of an objective measure of students' intelligence and academic ability. Grades are, as noted above, a slightly better predictor overall of academic performance but there are contexts where tests can add vital information to the admission process. Grade inflation throughout US high schools is creating a large number of students with perfect or near perfect grades but with huge differences in cognitive skills. Without tests there will be no way of distinguishing the truly capable from the diligently mediocre or the aggressively conformist.
If UC does stop using the SAT or ACT for admissions it is unlikely that it will institute a policy of open admissions, at least not yet. It is more probable they it will shift the criteria for selection to high school grades, teachers' recommendations, group membership, and unsupervised personal essays. The consequences of selection though inflatable high school grades and other subjective measures will almost certainly be a significant decline in the average cognitive skills of students at currently selective universities.
American universities will probably become more representative of the ethnic, gender and racial structure of America or the world, more conscientious, more extroverted, more socially aware. Perhaps this will be compensation for the decline in cognitive ability.
It is unlikely that the levelling process will end there. In the years to come there will very probably be demands that universities stop using high school grades or admission essays or anything else that shows a social or racial gap. Studies will be cited showing that wealthy white parents help their children with homework or drive them to volunteering activities or pay for sports equipment or get professional advice about their diversity essays.
Ultimately there will be a situation where American universities see a noticeable decline in the academic and cognitive ability of students and graduates in comparison with China and the Chinese diaspora, Japan, Korea, Russia and Eastern Europe and maybe India. Almost certainly this will be attributed by educational experts to the stinginess of federal and state authorities.
Perhaps there will come another Sputnik moment when America realises that it has fallen behind its competitors. If so it will probably be too late.