Sarah Palin and the University of Idaho
One of the more distasteful aspects of the US presidential election is the obsession in some quarters with Sara Palin's IQ. See here for example. Some have suggested that she is not particularly bright because she graduated from the University of Idaho and not from Columbia or Harvard.
May I point out that the University of Idaho, although it is not Harvard or Columbia, is ranked in the 400s in the Shanghai Jiao Tong rankings, which puts it way above most institutions in the world and in the United States.
May I also point out that Palin, unlike Joe Biden, has not been accused of plagiarism. Also, if we are going to be snobby about universities, one also wonders why Biden, if he were so clever, would plagiarise from Neil Kinnock who had to take his final exams twice at a university that also wasn't Harvard or Columbia
Wednesday, October 08, 2008
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Sour Grapes Watch
There is a definite smell of very sour grapes coming out of Imperial College London with the news that University College London has moved ahead in the Shanghai Jiao Tong University rankings, rising from 26th to 22th. Imperial has fallen from 23rd to 27th, a trivial distance by THES-QS standards. This account is from London Student, an online newspaper.
There are a few errors here. The ARWU categories are explained in the methodology section. Not all academics and employers recognise the Times (actually Times Higher Education, not the same thing) as the standard, especially in the USA. It is stretching things a bit to refer to the experts in the THE-QS "peer review". To be a reviewer requires no greater expertise than the ability to sign on to the mailing list of World Scientific, an academic publishing company that has -- this is no doubt completely irrelevant -- an interest in Imperial College Press.
There is a definite smell of very sour grapes coming out of Imperial College London with the news that University College London has moved ahead in the Shanghai Jiao Tong University rankings, rising from 26th to 22th. Imperial has fallen from 23rd to 27th, a trivial distance by THES-QS standards. This account is from London Student, an online newspaper.
Jovan Nedic, Editor-in-Chief of Imperial’s student paper Felix, said: “I mean
just look at the [ARWU] website, that alone tells you that this ranking is a
joke. None of the scoring categories are explained and the ones that are obvious
are not the best indication on what university is all about. It calls itself an
academic ranking, so why is a score on Alumni important?”This ranking is nothing
more than a joke and I’m surprised that London Student are even bothering to
look at it.”As to whether the new rankings meant UCL was ‘better‘, he continued:
“Academics and employers alike all recognise the Times one as the standard, only
those results will mean anything to Imperial students, until then, UCL and the
other 21 above Imperial can (in case they don’t get that, I mean all the ones
that are between 6th and 27th) can only dream to be better!”The difference
between criteria used in university rankings is a long-standing bone of
contention. While ARWU gives higher scores to universities whose staff and
students win Nobel Prizes, The Times bases 40 per cent of its scoring on
researchers peer-review - where experts are asked to list institutions they
think are top in their area.
There are a few errors here. The ARWU categories are explained in the methodology section. Not all academics and employers recognise the Times (actually Times Higher Education, not the same thing) as the standard, especially in the USA. It is stretching things a bit to refer to the experts in the THE-QS "peer review". To be a reviewer requires no greater expertise than the ability to sign on to the mailing list of World Scientific, an academic publishing company that has -- this is no doubt completely irrelevant -- an interest in Imperial College Press.
Another University Ranking
This one is from the Global Language Monitor. which "has ranked the nation’s [USA] colleges and universities according their appearance in the global print and electronic media, as well as on the Internet and throughout the Blogosphere. "
The top ten universities are:
1. Harvard University
2. Columbia University
3. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
4. University of California, Berkeley
5. Stanford University
6. University of Chicago
7. University of Wisconsin, Madison
8. Yale University
9. Princeton University
10. Cornell University
The top ten colleges are:
1. Colorado College
2. Williams College
3. University of Richmond
4. Middlebury College
5. Wellesley College
6. Bucknell University
7 . Amherst College
8. Oberlin College
9. Vassar College
10. Pomona College
This one is from the Global Language Monitor. which "has ranked the nation’s [USA] colleges and universities according their appearance in the global print and electronic media, as well as on the Internet and throughout the Blogosphere. "
The top ten universities are:
1. Harvard University
2. Columbia University
3. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
4. University of California, Berkeley
5. Stanford University
6. University of Chicago
7. University of Wisconsin, Madison
8. Yale University
9. Princeton University
10. Cornell University
The top ten colleges are:
1. Colorado College
2. Williams College
3. University of Richmond
4. Middlebury College
5. Wellesley College
6. Bucknell University
7 . Amherst College
8. Oberlin College
9. Vassar College
10. Pomona College
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
University Research Expenditure Rankings
There is an interesting ranking of US universities by the National Science Foundation according to total research and development expenditure.
Here are the top ten:
1. Johns Hopkins
2. Wisconsin (Madison)
3. UCLA
4. Minnesota
5. UC San Francisco
6. Washington
7. UC San Diego
8. Stanford
9. University of Pennsylvania
10. Duke
But does spending a lot of money necessarily lead to a high level of research productivity?
There is an interesting ranking of US universities by the National Science Foundation according to total research and development expenditure.
Here are the top ten:
1. Johns Hopkins
2. Wisconsin (Madison)
3. UCLA
4. Minnesota
5. UC San Francisco
6. Washington
7. UC San Diego
8. Stanford
9. University of Pennsylvania
10. Duke
But does spending a lot of money necessarily lead to a high level of research productivity?
Thursday, September 04, 2008
Plagiarism Multiple Standards Watch
A couple of recent news stories illustrate the multiple standards regarding plagiarism. Allison Routman, an undergraduate student, was kicked off a university of Virginia educational cruise ship for copying precisely three phrases from Wikipedia into a film review. The exact phrases were "when the Germans attacked the Soviet Union during Operation Barbarossa", "German speaking minority outside of Germany" and "who had been released from a concentration camp".
Assuming that the student has given a full and accurate account -- we have not heard from her instructors -- this would seem far too draconian. Would we consider a researcher who wrote "recent research has clearly shown that" to be plagiarising?. That phase gets 748 results from a Google Search.
Meanwhile , a new ranking by Forbes has put the University of Southern Illinois at Carbondale in 489th place among US colleges. The president of the university, Glenn Poshard, had plagiarised a substantial part of his doctoral dissertation written for the university's Department of Higher Education but a committee found that the plagiarism was inadvertent and he just had to revise the offending sections. Neither Poshard nor the university seem to have suffered much from the affair.
Next, Joe Biden has been picked as Barack Obama's running mate. Biden is well known for his plagiarism of a speech by Neil Kinnock during his presidential campaign and that was not his first offense. Still it has not hurt very much in the long run.
Incidentally, one wonders why Biden bothered to copy such a ridiculous passage . Kinnock said
A couple of recent news stories illustrate the multiple standards regarding plagiarism. Allison Routman, an undergraduate student, was kicked off a university of Virginia educational cruise ship for copying precisely three phrases from Wikipedia into a film review. The exact phrases were "when the Germans attacked the Soviet Union during Operation Barbarossa", "German speaking minority outside of Germany" and "who had been released from a concentration camp".
Assuming that the student has given a full and accurate account -- we have not heard from her instructors -- this would seem far too draconian. Would we consider a researcher who wrote "recent research has clearly shown that" to be plagiarising?. That phase gets 748 results from a Google Search.
Meanwhile , a new ranking by Forbes has put the University of Southern Illinois at Carbondale in 489th place among US colleges. The president of the university, Glenn Poshard, had plagiarised a substantial part of his doctoral dissertation written for the university's Department of Higher Education but a committee found that the plagiarism was inadvertent and he just had to revise the offending sections. Neither Poshard nor the university seem to have suffered much from the affair.
Next, Joe Biden has been picked as Barack Obama's running mate. Biden is well known for his plagiarism of a speech by Neil Kinnock during his presidential campaign and that was not his first offense. Still it has not hurt very much in the long run.
Incidentally, one wonders why Biden bothered to copy such a ridiculous passage . Kinnock said
Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get
to university? Why is Glenys the first woman in her family in a thousand
generations to be able to get to university? Was it because our predecessors
were thick? Does anybody really think that they didn't get what we had because
they didn't have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment?
Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could
stand.
Well, for 977 of those thousand generations it was because there were no universities in Scotland for anyone to go to.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
The Shanghai Rankings 2008
Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) has just released their rankings for 2008. Compared to the THE-QS rankings, public response, especially in Asia and Australia, has been slight. This is largely because ascent and descent within the Shanghai index is minimal, a tribute to their reliability. In contrast, the THE-QS rankings, with their changes in methodology and frequent errors, arouse almost as much interest as a country's performance in the Olympics.
Still, it is instructive to check how well various universities do on the different components of the Shanghai rankings.
The current top ten are as follows:
1. Harvard
2. Stanford
3. Berkeley
4. Cambridge
5. MIT
6. Caltech
7. Columbia
8. Princeton
9. Chicago
10. Oxford
Stanford goes down to number 8
Berkeley goes down to 11
Cambridge goes down to 23
MIT is down at 34
Caltech tumbles to 86
Columbia is down just a bit at 10
Princeton crashes to 120
Chicago falls to 72
Oxford goes down to 18
If this category represents current research output then it looks as though some American universities and Oxbridge have entered a period of decline. Of course, Caltech and MIT may suffer from the PUB category including social science research but would that explain why Princeton and Chicago are now apparently producing a relatively small amount of research?
Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) has just released their rankings for 2008. Compared to the THE-QS rankings, public response, especially in Asia and Australia, has been slight. This is largely because ascent and descent within the Shanghai index is minimal, a tribute to their reliability. In contrast, the THE-QS rankings, with their changes in methodology and frequent errors, arouse almost as much interest as a country's performance in the Olympics.
Still, it is instructive to check how well various universities do on the different components of the Shanghai rankings.
The current top ten are as follows:
1. Harvard
2. Stanford
3. Berkeley
4. Cambridge
5. MIT
6. Caltech
7. Columbia
8. Princeton
9. Chicago
10. Oxford
The Shanghai index includes two categories based on Nobel prizes and Fields medals. These measure the quality of research that might have been produced decades ago. Looking at the other criteria gives a rather different picture of current research.
It is interesting to see what happens to these ten if we rank them according to SJTU's PUB category, the total number of articles indexed in the Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCIE) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) in 2007. The SSCI gets a double weighting.
Harvard remains at number 1Stanford goes down to number 8
Berkeley goes down to 11
Cambridge goes down to 23
MIT is down at 34
Caltech tumbles to 86
Columbia is down just a bit at 10
Princeton crashes to 120
Chicago falls to 72
Oxford goes down to 18
If this category represents current research output then it looks as though some American universities and Oxbridge have entered a period of decline. Of course, Caltech and MIT may suffer from the PUB category including social science research but would that explain why Princeton and Chicago are now apparently producing a relatively small amount of research?
The top ten for PUB is
1. Harvard
2. Tokyo
3. Toronto
4. University of Michigan
5. UCLA
6. University of Washington
7. Stanford
8. Kyoto
9. Columbia
10. Berkeley
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Are Things Improving at QS?
I think it worth quoting from a recent comment.
There are signs that QS is making a commendable effort to avoid the errors that have been so prevalent in previous rankings. Still it is rather disconcerting that thousands of faculty have turned into hundreds, especially since it is not altogether impossible that some universities might conveniently forget to correct an error that might be to their advantage.
So, I was wondering how common simple basic errors are in the QS rankings. I have been looking at QS's topuniversities site and checking the number of students listed in the descriptions for each university, comparing the number of undergraduates and postgraduates with the total of all students. Here are the results just for the Universities beginning with A.
For these twelve universities no problems were noticed: Aarhus, Aberdeen, Aberystwyth, Antwerp, Arizona State University, Athens, Aston, Amsterdam, Adelaide, Australian National University, Austral, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In some cases there were minor discrepancies but not enough to cause concern.
About two weeks ago there were, in three cases, discrepancies between the number of total students and the combined numbers of undergraduates and post graduates: University of Arizona (more combined undergraduates and post graduates than total students), University of Auckland (number of postgraduates and total students the same) and Athens University of Economics and Business (more undergraduate international students than total international students) .
In the above three cases, at the time of writing the errors have been corrected with new entries.
There were however three cases where the errors at the time of writing had not been corrected. These are:
University of Arkansas
Full Time Equivalent (FTE) undergraduates. 20,416.
FTE graduate/postgraduate students 4,163.
Total FTE students 15,182.
Over 9,000 students "missing" from the total.
(correction: not the University of Arizona as was indicated in an earlier version of this post)
University of Alabama
FTE undergraduates 33, 986
FTE graduate/postgraduate students 8,291.
FTE total of 19,651 students.
Over 22,000 students “missing” from the total.
University of Alberta
FTE undergraduates 29,178.
FTE graduate/postgraduate students 5,419.
Total FTE total students 32,341.
About 2,500 students “missing” from the total.
I suspect that the problem with these three schools is that the totals of students were complied and entered separately and that the data for undergraduates and postgraduates included students in branch campuses, professional schools and/or research institutes and the data for total students did not. It will be interesting to see whether these errors will be corrected and whether new ones will emerge.
I think it worth quoting from a recent comment.
Just wanted to add a note about submitting data to THES based on my experience
here at a large Australian university. We forwarded our submission earlier this
year and now we have received a query on some of our numbers - a check just to
confirm if they are correct. And I can understand why they would need to be
checked. The numbers we submitted for staff (in the thousands) seem to have
changed to a number in the very low hundreds. Also, comments (made by us) that
were attached to specific sections have, in the past come back with typos... I
think this indicates that there is greater scope for human error in the
compilation of the data, even at such an early and relatively uncomplicated
phase of the data gathering process...
There are signs that QS is making a commendable effort to avoid the errors that have been so prevalent in previous rankings. Still it is rather disconcerting that thousands of faculty have turned into hundreds, especially since it is not altogether impossible that some universities might conveniently forget to correct an error that might be to their advantage.
So, I was wondering how common simple basic errors are in the QS rankings. I have been looking at QS's topuniversities site and checking the number of students listed in the descriptions for each university, comparing the number of undergraduates and postgraduates with the total of all students. Here are the results just for the Universities beginning with A.
For these twelve universities no problems were noticed: Aarhus, Aberdeen, Aberystwyth, Antwerp, Arizona State University, Athens, Aston, Amsterdam, Adelaide, Australian National University, Austral, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In some cases there were minor discrepancies but not enough to cause concern.
About two weeks ago there were, in three cases, discrepancies between the number of total students and the combined numbers of undergraduates and post graduates: University of Arizona (more combined undergraduates and post graduates than total students), University of Auckland (number of postgraduates and total students the same) and Athens University of Economics and Business (more undergraduate international students than total international students) .
In the above three cases, at the time of writing the errors have been corrected with new entries.
There were however three cases where the errors at the time of writing had not been corrected. These are:
University of Arkansas
Full Time Equivalent (FTE) undergraduates. 20,416.
FTE graduate/postgraduate students 4,163.
Total FTE students 15,182.
Over 9,000 students "missing" from the total.
(correction: not the University of Arizona as was indicated in an earlier version of this post)
University of Alabama
FTE undergraduates 33, 986
FTE graduate/postgraduate students 8,291.
FTE total of 19,651 students.
Over 22,000 students “missing” from the total.
University of Alberta
FTE undergraduates 29,178.
FTE graduate/postgraduate students 5,419.
Total FTE total students 32,341.
About 2,500 students “missing” from the total.
I suspect that the problem with these three schools is that the totals of students were complied and entered separately and that the data for undergraduates and postgraduates included students in branch campuses, professional schools and/or research institutes and the data for total students did not. It will be interesting to see whether these errors will be corrected and whether new ones will emerge.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Ranking Fever Sweeps America
The US college scene is buzzing about the latest ranking news. No, its not the impending THE-QS rankings but Princeton Review's list of top party schools. See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
It seems that US colleges are more concerned about being in the top 20 party schools or, in a few cases, in the top 20 stone-cold sober schools than their position in the THE-Qs rankings. And who is to say that they they are wrong.
The US college scene is buzzing about the latest ranking news. No, its not the impending THE-QS rankings but Princeton Review's list of top party schools. See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
It seems that US colleges are more concerned about being in the top 20 party schools or, in a few cases, in the top 20 stone-cold sober schools than their position in the THE-Qs rankings. And who is to say that they they are wrong.
The Princeton Review Rankings
The Princeton Review's Annual College Rankings, based on a survey of 120,000 US students, is now out. There are 62 lists and there seems to be something for everyone. Here are some of the top schools.
Middlebury College -- best professors
Wheaton College -- tastiest campus food
Loyola College -- best dorms
Yale -- most beautiful campus
Northeastern University -- best career and job placement service
Stanford -- best classroom experience
Texas A and M (College Station) -- most conservative students
Occidental College -- most liberal students
University of Florida (Gainesville) -- top party school
Brigham Young University -- top stone-cold sober school
City University of new York -- most diverse student body
University of Maryland at College Part -- best athletic facilities
The Princeton Review's Annual College Rankings, based on a survey of 120,000 US students, is now out. There are 62 lists and there seems to be something for everyone. Here are some of the top schools.
Middlebury College -- best professors
Wheaton College -- tastiest campus food
Loyola College -- best dorms
Yale -- most beautiful campus
Northeastern University -- best career and job placement service
Stanford -- best classroom experience
Texas A and M (College Station) -- most conservative students
Occidental College -- most liberal students
University of Florida (Gainesville) -- top party school
Brigham Young University -- top stone-cold sober school
City University of new York -- most diverse student body
University of Maryland at College Part -- best athletic facilities
Monday, July 28, 2008
Another University Ranking
The Ecole des Mines de Paris has produced a new ranking based on the number of corporate leaders trained by universities. Its website reports:
It is good to be reminded that universities do other things and not just research. Still this is a very limited measure of excellence.
Here are the top ten
1. Harvard Univ
2. Tokyo Univ
3 Stanford Univ
4 Ecole Polytechnique Paris
5 École des Hautes Études Commerciales Paris
6 Univ Pennsylvania
7 Massachusetts Inst Tech (MIT)
8 Sciences Po - Paris
9 ENA Paris
10 Ecole des Mines de Paris
There are five French schools in the top ten which may say something about the excellence of these institutions or perhaps something about French cultural introversion. Only four foreign institutions have contributed to the training of 37 French CEOs. For the 38 British CEOs the corresponding figure is 22, including Gettysburg College, the US Naval Academy, University College Cork, Utrecht, Witwatersrand and, of course, the Ecole des Mines.
I noticed that in at least two cases, Strode's College in Surrey and Malay College in Malaysia, secondary schools were listed as diploma-granting institutions.
The Ecole des Mines de Paris has produced a new ranking based on the number of corporate leaders trained by universities. Its website reports:
The École des Mines de Paris ranking is based on a quite different
criterion: the number of alumni holding a Chief Executive Officer position (CEO)
in one of the 500 leading worldwide companies as of the date of the Shanghai
ranking 2006. This criterion is aimed at being the equivalent among companies of
the criterion for alumni who have been awarded the Nobel Prize or the Fields
Medal, as the numbers involved are similar.
We have chosen to identify the
500 leading enterprises on the basis of the "Global Fortune 500", based on the
criterion of the published annual turnover and conducted by Fortune
magazine.
It is good to be reminded that universities do other things and not just research. Still this is a very limited measure of excellence.
Here are the top ten
1. Harvard Univ
2. Tokyo Univ
3 Stanford Univ
4 Ecole Polytechnique Paris
5 École des Hautes Études Commerciales Paris
6 Univ Pennsylvania
7 Massachusetts Inst Tech (MIT)
8 Sciences Po - Paris
9 ENA Paris
10 Ecole des Mines de Paris
There are five French schools in the top ten which may say something about the excellence of these institutions or perhaps something about French cultural introversion. Only four foreign institutions have contributed to the training of 37 French CEOs. For the 38 British CEOs the corresponding figure is 22, including Gettysburg College, the US Naval Academy, University College Cork, Utrecht, Witwatersrand and, of course, the Ecole des Mines.
I noticed that in at least two cases, Strode's College in Surrey and Malay College in Malaysia, secondary schools were listed as diploma-granting institutions.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Another Use of Rankings
BBC News reports that graduates of lower ranking universities are more dishonest than those from institutions further up the ranking ladder.
"Analysis of 3,876 financial service job applications found embellishments on the forms of 43% of applicants from the UK's lowest ranking universities.
Only 14% of applicants from the top 20 UK universities were found to have fibbed in their applications.
The survey was commissioned by a pre-employment screening firm, Powerchex.
Its managing director Alexandra Kelly said: "What this survey says is that graduates from lesser-known universities may feel the need to alter their background to compete."
There is no definitive ranking of universities. For the survey the researchers at the Shell technology and enterprise programme used the Times Online 2009 ranking. "
Given the amount of soft marking and numbers massaging that British universities do to get a good place in the rankings, is it posible that graduates of the good ones do not need to embellish their CVs because their universities do all the necessary embellishment for them?
BBC News reports that graduates of lower ranking universities are more dishonest than those from institutions further up the ranking ladder.
"Analysis of 3,876 financial service job applications found embellishments on the forms of 43% of applicants from the UK's lowest ranking universities.
Only 14% of applicants from the top 20 UK universities were found to have fibbed in their applications.
The survey was commissioned by a pre-employment screening firm, Powerchex.
Its managing director Alexandra Kelly said: "What this survey says is that graduates from lesser-known universities may feel the need to alter their background to compete."
There is no definitive ranking of universities. For the survey the researchers at the Shell technology and enterprise programme used the Times Online 2009 ranking. "
Given the amount of soft marking and numbers massaging that British universities do to get a good place in the rankings, is it posible that graduates of the good ones do not need to embellish their CVs because their universities do all the necessary embellishment for them?
Friday, July 18, 2008
France Wants a New Ranking System
One consequence of the ranking craze is the proliferation of "minor leagues" as universities and countries that do badly on prominent rankings encourage the creation of more and more indexes and league tables on which they hope to better.
The French Senate is now proposing a new ranking system for European universities. It is not happy with the attention given to the Shanghai Jiao Tong index where French institutions do not perform very well.
The report on the euractiv site continues:
"France's key bone of contention with the Shanghai index is that the number of citations of a institution's scientific research is used as a ranking factor. Paris says this works against countries that do not publish in English.
Senator Joël Bourdin, the rapporteur on the report, argues that the intrinsic value of the Shanghai ranking is highly questionable ["très discutable"] and owes its interest only to its "mobilising effect".
The highest-ranking French university in the 2006 Shanghai ranking was Paris VI in 39th place, while American universities occupy more than half of the top 100. The only European universities in the top 10 are the UK's Universities of Cambridge and Oxford.
While French Higher Education Minister Valerie Pécresse has said she wishes to use the French EU Presidency to "lay down the foundations of common European criteria" for university classification, Bourdin argues that France should already go ahead and develop its own national classification system, as an EU-level process would take years. "
One wonders why the French do not simply use the citations per faculty section of the THE-QS rankings which shows the Ecole Normale Superieure in 4th place just ahead of the University of Alabama (5th), Pohang University of Science and Technology (11th), University of Helsinki (17th), Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (20th). On this measure the ecole does better than Princeton, Harvard, Cornell and Columbia.
The report can viewed here.
One consequence of the ranking craze is the proliferation of "minor leagues" as universities and countries that do badly on prominent rankings encourage the creation of more and more indexes and league tables on which they hope to better.
The French Senate is now proposing a new ranking system for European universities. It is not happy with the attention given to the Shanghai Jiao Tong index where French institutions do not perform very well.
The report on the euractiv site continues:
"France's key bone of contention with the Shanghai index is that the number of citations of a institution's scientific research is used as a ranking factor. Paris says this works against countries that do not publish in English.
Senator Joël Bourdin, the rapporteur on the report, argues that the intrinsic value of the Shanghai ranking is highly questionable ["très discutable"] and owes its interest only to its "mobilising effect".
The highest-ranking French university in the 2006 Shanghai ranking was Paris VI in 39th place, while American universities occupy more than half of the top 100. The only European universities in the top 10 are the UK's Universities of Cambridge and Oxford.
While French Higher Education Minister Valerie Pécresse has said she wishes to use the French EU Presidency to "lay down the foundations of common European criteria" for university classification, Bourdin argues that France should already go ahead and develop its own national classification system, as an EU-level process would take years. "
One wonders why the French do not simply use the citations per faculty section of the THE-QS rankings which shows the Ecole Normale Superieure in 4th place just ahead of the University of Alabama (5th), Pohang University of Science and Technology (11th), University of Helsinki (17th), Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (20th). On this measure the ecole does better than Princeton, Harvard, Cornell and Columbia.
The report can viewed here.
Descending into Farce
A report in the Independent (UK) provides further evidence of the destructive effects of the obsession with rankings.
"The university degree classification system is "descending into farce", the chairman of the Commons Select Committee on Universities has said.
Phil Willis was speaking as MPs questioned Peter Williams, the chief executive of the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), the higher education watchdog, on degree standards. "An individual institution can award as many firsts as it wants, provided it satisfies its own criteria on what is a first," Mr Willis said.
It followed comments from Professor Geoffrey Alderman, the former head of quality at the University of London, which were reported in The Independent, that lecturers had been told to "mark softly" to ensure enough first-class degree passes were awarded to win a high ranking in league tables. He also alleged universities were turning a "blind eye" to plagiarism by international students because they were dependent on income from their fees. "
A report in the Independent (UK) provides further evidence of the destructive effects of the obsession with rankings.
"The university degree classification system is "descending into farce", the chairman of the Commons Select Committee on Universities has said.
Phil Willis was speaking as MPs questioned Peter Williams, the chief executive of the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), the higher education watchdog, on degree standards. "An individual institution can award as many firsts as it wants, provided it satisfies its own criteria on what is a first," Mr Willis said.
It followed comments from Professor Geoffrey Alderman, the former head of quality at the University of London, which were reported in The Independent, that lecturers had been told to "mark softly" to ensure enough first-class degree passes were awarded to win a high ranking in league tables. He also alleged universities were turning a "blind eye" to plagiarism by international students because they were dependent on income from their fees. "
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Comments on Ben Sowter's Comments
This is in reply to comments by Ben Sowter, head of research at QS, on my post of July 10th.
First of all, I was mistaken about the BlackBerry. At the end of the survey there is a box to tick if respondents want a chance to win one.
Next, I am glad to learn that Ben is a frequent reader of this blog. Thank you also for the comment that "Much of your analysis is detailed and shrewd. In fact, whilst I have declined to comment in the past we have kept an eye on your blog and, in some areas, chosen to make improvements based on your observations".
The clarification that the current survey is of prior respondents only and that later e-mails will also be sent to World Scientific subscribers is also welcome.
As for wondering why Malaysian universities were not on the first list, the introductory messages says that "You'll notice some slight differences to the survey this year - mainly in that we have included a lot more universities - as a result there are two questions about universities - one asking about those around the world, and a second asking about your own country specifically". I assumed that "around the world" meant that every country in the world would be included. The information should have read "around the world excluding your your own country". Still, I accept that I jumped to an unwarranted conclusion.
I think that there are serious questions remaining about the implications of this change. If QS are going to use only the responses to the first list when calculating the score for the academic opinion criterion then this would surely mean a noticeable reduction in the number of votes for universities that got a large number of responses from other places in that country. I suspect that this would have a disproportionate effect on American and Japanese universities. Wouldn't it also have a relatively beneficial impact on British universities with lots of graduates in the Commonwealth and Australia with graduates in South East Asia and China, countries with a lot of names in the World Scientific database?
Ben's comment that the purpose of having two lists is so that "we can do some more analysis on response dynamics and, potentially, more effectively counteract country biases" suggests that this might be the case since the implication is that the second list will not be used to construct the scores for the "peer review".
Is it possible that such a change would give Cambridge, Oxford and Imperial College London a further advantage over Harvard and push one of the former three into the number one spot?
This is in reply to comments by Ben Sowter, head of research at QS, on my post of July 10th.
First of all, I was mistaken about the BlackBerry. At the end of the survey there is a box to tick if respondents want a chance to win one.
Next, I am glad to learn that Ben is a frequent reader of this blog. Thank you also for the comment that "Much of your analysis is detailed and shrewd. In fact, whilst I have declined to comment in the past we have kept an eye on your blog and, in some areas, chosen to make improvements based on your observations".
The clarification that the current survey is of prior respondents only and that later e-mails will also be sent to World Scientific subscribers is also welcome.
As for wondering why Malaysian universities were not on the first list, the introductory messages says that "You'll notice some slight differences to the survey this year - mainly in that we have included a lot more universities - as a result there are two questions about universities - one asking about those around the world, and a second asking about your own country specifically". I assumed that "around the world" meant that every country in the world would be included. The information should have read "around the world excluding your your own country". Still, I accept that I jumped to an unwarranted conclusion.
I think that there are serious questions remaining about the implications of this change. If QS are going to use only the responses to the first list when calculating the score for the academic opinion criterion then this would surely mean a noticeable reduction in the number of votes for universities that got a large number of responses from other places in that country. I suspect that this would have a disproportionate effect on American and Japanese universities. Wouldn't it also have a relatively beneficial impact on British universities with lots of graduates in the Commonwealth and Australia with graduates in South East Asia and China, countries with a lot of names in the World Scientific database?
Ben's comment that the purpose of having two lists is so that "we can do some more analysis on response dynamics and, potentially, more effectively counteract country biases" suggests that this might be the case since the implication is that the second list will not be used to construct the scores for the "peer review".
Is it possible that such a change would give Cambridge, Oxford and Imperial College London a further advantage over Harvard and push one of the former three into the number one spot?
Comments on "What's Happened to Malaysia?"
I recently posted on what I thought was the removal of Malaysian universities from the THES-QS survey of academic opinion.
It appears, as comments on the post and my own fiddling about with the survey indicate, that what has happened is that the survey is divided into two parts: the first in which all universities in the country where the respondent works are excluded and a second in which only those universities -- minus the one where the respondent works -- are presented.
It seems that I have been unfair to QS on this occasion. There are, however, some issues about the survey that I will discuss in a little while.
Two comments refer to the absence on the State University of New York from the list. In fact, Stony Brook is there but not the other three campuses at Binghamton, Albany and Buffalo.
I recently posted on what I thought was the removal of Malaysian universities from the THES-QS survey of academic opinion.
It appears, as comments on the post and my own fiddling about with the survey indicate, that what has happened is that the survey is divided into two parts: the first in which all universities in the country where the respondent works are excluded and a second in which only those universities -- minus the one where the respondent works -- are presented.
It seems that I have been unfair to QS on this occasion. There are, however, some issues about the survey that I will discuss in a little while.
Two comments refer to the absence on the State University of New York from the list. In fact, Stony Brook is there but not the other three campuses at Binghamton, Albany and Buffalo.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
How to get into the Top 50
Malaysia has declared that it wants to get a couple of local universities into the world's top 50. This obviously means the THES-QS and not the Shanghai Jiao Tong index.
So what should a Malaysian university do to get into the 50 on the THES-QS ranking? I assume that the likeliest candidate is Universiti Malaya (UM) and that it should try to equal the score of the University of Auckland, which was 50th in last year's index.
In 2007, Auckland got a total score of 77.5 made up of 95 for the "peer review", 83 for the employer review, 38 for student faculty ratio, 61 for citations per faculty, 100 for international faculty, and 99 for international students.
UM got a total of 49.4 made up 66 for the "peer review", 66 for the employer review, 38 for the student faculty ratio, 14 for citations per faculty, 63 for international faculty and 41 for international students.
So what does UM have to do to get a score equal to Auckland's?
- First of all , it should make sure that UM is actually included in the survey of academic opinion (see previous post). If it is not, then UM will probably not even make it into the top 500. Then it has to improve its score on this criterion by about half (the use of Z scores means that we can't be more exact than this) .
- Then the score on the employer review would have to increase by about a third.
- No need to worry about the student faculty ratio. UM is as good as Auckland.
- The number of citations per faculty would have to improve four-fold.
- The proportion of international students would have to increase by two thirds.
- The proportion of international students would have to more than double.
I doubt that it is worth trying to do better on the "peer review" and the "employer review" since these are opaque and biased. Increasing the number of international faculty and students would probably cause more trouble than its worth without strict controls over quality.
Could the citations per faculty be improved? This is not totally impossible. Over ten years Cardiff University managed to triple total research output. According to an interview with the Star, noted in an earlier post, this is how it was done.
To encourage productivity, Prof Smith switched the promotion system from a quota-based system (where the total number of professorial positions in a faculty were pre-determined) to a performance-based one.
He even offered an attractive retirement package to faculty members who were not producing much research.
However, in order for universities to be able to do that, Prof Smith said they need autonomy.
“The university has to be free to offer different contracts (to academics and scientists).
“And within the university, a lot of power needs to be devolved to the young people.
“It's all about having decisions taken at the lowest level practicable.
“That’s a major change,” he said.
What's Happened to Malaysia?
It's that time of year again. A few days ago I received an invitation to take part in the THES-QS "peer review" Last year it came via World Scientific, the Singapore-based publishing company whose subscription list has been used by QS to construct their list of "smart people " who pass judgement on the world's universities. This year it came directly from QS. I do not know whether this means that QS is now using the THES subscription list as its database. If so, we can expect to see some wild fluctuations in the "peer review" and hence the overall rankings in October.
Anyway, here is message from QS.
It's that time of year again. Each year the response to the academic peer review for the Times Higher - QS World University Rankings goes from strength to strength.
QS and Times Higher Education are committed to making these rankings as strong and robust as they can be. Many enhancements have been made to the system in the last 12 months (you can read about them on http://www.topuniversities.com/) but amongst the most important has been your help in increasing the response to our academic peer review questionnaire.
Put simply... your opinion counts. Please share it with us.
You'll notice some slight differences to the survey this year - mainly in that we have included a lot more universities - as a result there are two questions about universities - one asking about those around the world, and a second asking about your own country specifically.
Please be as accurate and honest as possible. Help us make sure that your university contributes a representative response to the survey this year.
http://research.qsnetwork.com/academic
The deadline for response is July 15th.
At the end of the survey, from a selection of offers, you will have the chance to either...
Opt for a $100 discount on delegate's fee for QS APPLE (Asia Pacific Professional Leaders in Education Conference & Exhibition) 2009 in Kuala Lumpur
Enter a draw to win your university a free exhibition table at the QS World Grad School Tour (the world's leading circuit of Masters & PhD recruitement fairs) in a city of your choice
Receive a month month trial subscription to Times Higher Education
Thank you for taking the time to share your opinions with us, and please look out for the results of the Times Higher - QS World University Rankings 2008 - due to be published on October 9th.
Many thanks,
Ben SowterHead of ResearchQS
I was disappointed that I would not have a chance of getting a BlackBerry this time around. I started to fill out the form but stopped when I noticed something very odd. There are no Malaysian universities listed this year. Possible explanations are:
A. For some reason, QS have decided that no Malaysian university is of sufficient quality to even be included in the survey. This is unlikely considering some of the others that are included.
B. QS state at the start of the survey that the respondent's own university will be excluded from consideration. Since I work at a Malaysian university it is to be expected that that particular university would not show up. Perhaps some sort of error has meant that all Malaysian universities have been excluded from the list presented to me.
C. QS have made a principled decision that respondents are not allowed to choose any university in the country in which they work. This would be a good idea and therefore can probably be ruled out straightaway.
D. QS just forgot about Malaysia.
E. A computer error that affected me and nobody else.
Based on past experience, D seems the most likely, followed by B. If D, then in October Malaysian universities are going to get zero on this year's "peer review" and therefore will fall even further in the rankings. There will no doubt be an mass outbreak of soul searching in Malaysian universities and jeering by the opposition. If B, The fall will not be so great but Malaysian universities would still suffer if they are the only ones who cannot receive votes from within the country.
I appeal to any reader of this blog who has completed or is about to complete the THES-QS survey to let me know whether they have also noticed the omission of Malaysian universities or of any other country.
It's that time of year again. A few days ago I received an invitation to take part in the THES-QS "peer review" Last year it came via World Scientific, the Singapore-based publishing company whose subscription list has been used by QS to construct their list of "smart people " who pass judgement on the world's universities. This year it came directly from QS. I do not know whether this means that QS is now using the THES subscription list as its database. If so, we can expect to see some wild fluctuations in the "peer review" and hence the overall rankings in October.
Anyway, here is message from QS.
It's that time of year again. Each year the response to the academic peer review for the Times Higher - QS World University Rankings goes from strength to strength.
QS and Times Higher Education are committed to making these rankings as strong and robust as they can be. Many enhancements have been made to the system in the last 12 months (you can read about them on http://www.topuniversities.com/) but amongst the most important has been your help in increasing the response to our academic peer review questionnaire.
Put simply... your opinion counts. Please share it with us.
You'll notice some slight differences to the survey this year - mainly in that we have included a lot more universities - as a result there are two questions about universities - one asking about those around the world, and a second asking about your own country specifically.
Please be as accurate and honest as possible. Help us make sure that your university contributes a representative response to the survey this year.
http://research.qsnetwork.com/academic
The deadline for response is July 15th.
At the end of the survey, from a selection of offers, you will have the chance to either...
Opt for a $100 discount on delegate's fee for QS APPLE (Asia Pacific Professional Leaders in Education Conference & Exhibition) 2009 in Kuala Lumpur
Enter a draw to win your university a free exhibition table at the QS World Grad School Tour (the world's leading circuit of Masters & PhD recruitement fairs) in a city of your choice
Receive a month month trial subscription to Times Higher Education
Thank you for taking the time to share your opinions with us, and please look out for the results of the Times Higher - QS World University Rankings 2008 - due to be published on October 9th.
Many thanks,
Ben SowterHead of ResearchQS
I was disappointed that I would not have a chance of getting a BlackBerry this time around. I started to fill out the form but stopped when I noticed something very odd. There are no Malaysian universities listed this year. Possible explanations are:
A. For some reason, QS have decided that no Malaysian university is of sufficient quality to even be included in the survey. This is unlikely considering some of the others that are included.
B. QS state at the start of the survey that the respondent's own university will be excluded from consideration. Since I work at a Malaysian university it is to be expected that that particular university would not show up. Perhaps some sort of error has meant that all Malaysian universities have been excluded from the list presented to me.
C. QS have made a principled decision that respondents are not allowed to choose any university in the country in which they work. This would be a good idea and therefore can probably be ruled out straightaway.
D. QS just forgot about Malaysia.
E. A computer error that affected me and nobody else.
Based on past experience, D seems the most likely, followed by B. If D, then in October Malaysian universities are going to get zero on this year's "peer review" and therefore will fall even further in the rankings. There will no doubt be an mass outbreak of soul searching in Malaysian universities and jeering by the opposition. If B, The fall will not be so great but Malaysian universities would still suffer if they are the only ones who cannot receive votes from within the country.
I appeal to any reader of this blog who has completed or is about to complete the THES-QS survey to let me know whether they have also noticed the omission of Malaysian universities or of any other country.
Friday, June 27, 2008
Why are German universities so bad?
A recent post by Steve Sailer compares the Shanghai Jiao Tong and the QS-Times Higher Education Supplement rankings (although he refers to the London Times, a completely different publication).
He asserts
"This Chinese list seems less chauvinistically biased than the London Times rankings I cited in tonight's VDARE article (Harvard #1 in both, but Stanford is #2 on the Chinese list vs. #19 on the English list, behind a number of obscure provincial colleges in England). Because it's a better list, it supports the point I made in VDARE even more strongly than the previous list did: that America's exclusive universities are now enormously prestigious relative to Germany's and the rest of the world's.
German colleges that would have dominated the list 100 years ago have been hit hard by sincere, leftist anti-elitism"
That the Chinese rankings are less chauvinistic than QS-THES is absolutely correct. And if he is being deliberately offensive by describing Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial and University Colleges, London as "obscure provincial colleges in England", I suppose that I couldn't really argue.
But surely the decline of German universities began well before leftist anti-elitism appeared on the scene? Didn't it begin with the mass expulsion of Jewish students and academics after 1933?
A recent post by Steve Sailer compares the Shanghai Jiao Tong and the QS-Times Higher Education Supplement rankings (although he refers to the London Times, a completely different publication).
He asserts
"This Chinese list seems less chauvinistically biased than the London Times rankings I cited in tonight's VDARE article (Harvard #1 in both, but Stanford is #2 on the Chinese list vs. #19 on the English list, behind a number of obscure provincial colleges in England). Because it's a better list, it supports the point I made in VDARE even more strongly than the previous list did: that America's exclusive universities are now enormously prestigious relative to Germany's and the rest of the world's.
German colleges that would have dominated the list 100 years ago have been hit hard by sincere, leftist anti-elitism"
That the Chinese rankings are less chauvinistic than QS-THES is absolutely correct. And if he is being deliberately offensive by describing Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial and University Colleges, London as "obscure provincial colleges in England", I suppose that I couldn't really argue.
But surely the decline of German universities began well before leftist anti-elitism appeared on the scene? Didn't it begin with the mass expulsion of Jewish students and academics after 1933?
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Resumption of Posting
Teaching and family affairs have kept me away from this blog for a few months. I hope to start posting regularly again soon.
QS’s Greatest Hits: Part One
For the moment, it might be interesting to review some of the more spectacular errors of QS Quacquarelli Symonds Ltd (QS), the consultants who collect the data for the Times Higher Education Supplement’s (THES) World University Rankings.
During its short venture into the ranking business QS has shown a remarkable flair for error. In terms of quantity and variety they have no peers. All rankers make mistakes now and then but so far there has been nobody quite like QS.
Here is a list of what I think are QS’s ten best errors, mainly from the rankings and their book, Guide to the World’s Top Universities (2007). Most of them have been discussed in earlier posts on this blog. The date of these posts is given in brackets. There is one error, relating to Washington University in St. Louis, from last year’s rankings,
It has to be admitted that QS seem to be doing better recently. Or perhaps I have not been looking as hard as I used to. I hope that another ten errors will follow shortly.
One: Faculty Student Ratio in Guide to the World’s Top Universities (2007). (July 27, 2007; May 11, 2007)
This is a beautiful example of the butterfly effect, with a single slip of the mouse leading to literally hundreds of mistakes.
QS’s book, Guide to the World’s Top Universities, was produced at the end of 2006 after the publication of the rankings for that year and contained data about student faculty ratios of over 500 ranked universities. It should have been obvious immediately that there was something wrong with this data. Yale is given a ratio of 34.1, Harvard 18, Cambridge 18.9 and Pretoria 590 .3. On the other hand, there are some ridiculously low figures such as 3.5 for Dublin Institute of Technology and 6.1 for the University of Santo Tomas (Philippines).
Sometimes the ratios given flatly contradict information given on the same page. So, on page 127 in the FACTFILE, we are told that Yale has a student faculty ratio of 34.3. Over on the left we are informed that Yale has around 10,000 students and 3,333 faculty.
There is also no relationship between the ratios and the scores out of 100 in the THES QS rankings for student faculty ratio, something that Matt Rayner asked about, without ever receiving a reply, on QS’s topuniversities web site.
So what happened? It’s very simple. Someone slipped three rows when copying and pasting data and every single student faculty ratio in the book, over 500 of them, is wrong. Dublin Institute of Technology was given Duke’s ratio (more about that later), Pretoria got Pune’s, Aachen RWT got Aberystwyth’s (Wales). And so on. Altogether over 500 errors.
Two: International Students and Faculty in Malaysian Universities.
In 2004 there was great jubilation at Universiti Malaya (UM) in Malaysia. The university had reached 89th place in the THES-QS world rankings. Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) also did very well. Then in 2005 came disaster. UM crashed 100 places, seriously damaging the Vice-Chancellor’s career, and USM disappeared from the top 200 altogether. The Malaysian political opposition had a field day blasting away at the supposed incompetence of the university leadership.
The dramatic decline should have been no surprise at all. A Malaysian blogger had already noticed that the figures for international students and faculty in 2004 were unrelated to reality. What happened was that in 2004 QS were under the impression that larger numbers of foreigners were studying and teaching at the two Malaysian universities. Actually, there were just a lot of Malaysian citizens of Indian and Chinese descent. In 2005 the error was corrected causing the scores for international faculty and students to fall precipitously.
Later, THES referred to this as “a clarification of data”, a piece of elegant British establishment obfuscation that is almost as good as “being economical with the truth”
Three: Duke’s student faculty ratio 2005 ( October 30, 2006 )
Between 2004 and 2005 Duke rose dramatically in the rankings. It did so mainly because it had been given a very low and incredible student faculty ratio in the latter year, less than two students per faculty. This was not the best ratio in the rankings. That supposedly belonged to Ecole Polytechnique in Paris (more of that later). But it was favourable enough to give Duke a powerful boost in the rankings.
The ratio was the result of a laughable error. QS listed Duke as having 6,244 faculty, well in excess of anything claimed on the university’s web site. Oddly enough, this was exactly the number of undergraduate students enrolled at Duke in the fall of 2005. Somebody evidently had copied down the figure for undergraduate students and counted them as faculty, giving Duke four times the number of faculty it should have.
Four: Duke’s student faculty ratio 2006 (December 16, 2006)
Having made a mess of Duke’s student faculty ratio in 2005, QS pulled off a truly spectacular feat in 2006 by making an even bigger mess. The problem, I suspect, was that Duke’s public relations office had its hands full with the Lacrosse rape hoax and that the web site had not been fully updated since the fall of 2005. For students, QS apparently took undergraduate student enrollment in the fall of 2005, subtracted the number of undergraduate degrees awarded and added the 2005 intake. This is a bit crude because some students would leave without taking a degree, Reade Seligmann and Colin Finnerty for example, but probably not too inaccurate. Then, there was a bit of a problem because while the number of postgraduate degrees awarded was indicated on the site there was no reference to postgraduate admissions. So, QS seem to have deducted the degrees awarded and added what they thought was number of postgraduate students admitted, 300 of them, to the Pratt School of Engineering, which is an undergraduate, not a graduate school. Then, in a final flourish they calculated the number of faculty by doubling the figure on the Duke site, apparently because Duke listed the same number classified first by department and then by status.
The result was that the number of students was undercounted and the number of faculty seriously overcounted, giving Duke the best student faculty ratio for the year. Although the ratio was higher than in 2005 Duke was now in first place for this section because QS had calculated more realistic ratios for the Ecole Polytechnique and the Ecole Normale Superieure.
Five: Omission of Kenan Flagler from the Fortune business school rankings. (March 05, 2007)
On the surface this was a trivial error compared to some that QS has committed. They got the business school at the University of North Carolina mixed up with that of North Carolina State University. The grossness of this error is that while most American universities seem unconcerned about the things that QS writes or does not write about them, business schools evidently feel that more is at stake and also have considerable influence over the magazines and newspaper that publish rankings. Kenan-Flagler protested vociferously over its omission, Fortune pulled the ranking off its site, Nunzio Quacquarelli, director of QS, explained that it was the result of a lapse by a junior employee and stated that this sort of thing had never happened before and would never happen again.
Six: "Beijing University"
China’s best or second best university is Peking University. The name has not been changed to Beijing University apparently to avoid confusion with Beijing Normal University. There are also over twenty specialist universities in Beijing: Traditional Chinese Medicine, Foreign Languages, Aeronautics and so on.
In 2004 and 2005 THES and QS referred to Beijing University finally correcting it to Peking University in 2006.
This was perhaps not too serious an error except that it revealed something about QS’s knowledge of its own sources and procedures.
In November 2005. Nunzio Quacquarelli went to a meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Much of the meeting was about the international students and faculty at UM and USM. There was apparently also a question about how Beijing University could have got such a magnificent score on the peer review while apparently producing almost no research. The correct answer would have been that QS was trying to find research written by scholars at Beijing University, which does not exist. Quacquarelli, however, answered that “we just couldn’t find the research” because Beijing University academics published in Mandarin (Kuala Lumpur New Straits Times 20/11/05).
This is revealing because QS’s “peer review” is actually nothing more than a survey of the subscribers to World Scientific, a Singapore-based company that publishes academic books and journals, many of them Asia-orientated and mostly written in English. World Scientific has very close ties with Peking University. If Quacquarelli knew very much about the company that produces his company’s survey he would surely have known that it had a cozy relationship with Peking University and that Chinese researchers, in the physical sciences at least, do quite a lot of publishing in English.
Seven: Student faculty ratios at Yonsei and Korea universities (November 08, 2006)
Another distinguished university administrator whose career suffered because of a QS error was of Yonsei University. This university is a rival of Korea University and was on most measures its equal or superior. But on the THES – QS rankings it was way behind, largely because of a poor student faculty ratio. As it happened, the figure given for Korea University was far too favourable and much better even than the ratio admitted by the university itself. This did not, however, help Jung Chang-Young who had to resign.
Eight: Omission of SUNY – Binghamton, Buffalo and Albany
THES and QS have apologized for omitting the British universities of Lancaster, Essex and Royal Holloway. A more serious omission is the omission of the State University of New York’s (SUNY) University Centres at Buffalo, Albany and Binghamton. SUNY has four autonomous university centres which are normally treated as independent and are now often referred to as the Universities of Buffalo and Albany and Binghamton University. THES-QS does refer to one university centre as Stony Brook University, probably being under the impression that this is the entirety of the SUNY system. Binghamton is ranked 82nd according to the USNWR and 37th among public national universities (2008). It can boast several internationally known scholars such as Melvin Dubofsky in labour history and Immanuel Wallerstein in sociology. To exclude it from the rankings while including the likes of Dublin Institute of Technology and the University of Pune is ridiculous.
Nine: Student faculty ratio at Ecole Polytechnique (September 08, 2006)
In 2005 the Ecole Polytechnique went zooming up the rankings to become the best university in continental Europe. Then in 2006 it went zooming down again. All this was s because of extraordinary fluctuations in the student faculty ratio. What happened could be determined by looking at the data on QS’s topgraduate site. Clicking on the rankings for 2005 led to the data that was used for that year (it is no longer available). There were two sets of data for students and faculty for that year, evidently one containing part-time faculty and another with only full time faculty. It seems that in 2005 part-time faculty were counted but not in 2006.
Ten: Washington University in St Louis (November 11, 2007)
This is a leading university in every respect. Yet in 2007, QS gave it a score of precisely one for citations per faculty, behind Universitas Gadjah Mada, the Dublin Institute of Technology and Politecnico di Milano and sent it falling from 48th to 161st in the overall rankings. What happened was that QS got mixed up with the University of Washington (in Seattle) and gave all WUSL’s citations to the latter school.
Teaching and family affairs have kept me away from this blog for a few months. I hope to start posting regularly again soon.
QS’s Greatest Hits: Part One
For the moment, it might be interesting to review some of the more spectacular errors of QS Quacquarelli Symonds Ltd (QS), the consultants who collect the data for the Times Higher Education Supplement’s (THES) World University Rankings.
During its short venture into the ranking business QS has shown a remarkable flair for error. In terms of quantity and variety they have no peers. All rankers make mistakes now and then but so far there has been nobody quite like QS.
Here is a list of what I think are QS’s ten best errors, mainly from the rankings and their book, Guide to the World’s Top Universities (2007). Most of them have been discussed in earlier posts on this blog. The date of these posts is given in brackets. There is one error, relating to Washington University in St. Louis, from last year’s rankings,
It has to be admitted that QS seem to be doing better recently. Or perhaps I have not been looking as hard as I used to. I hope that another ten errors will follow shortly.
One: Faculty Student Ratio in Guide to the World’s Top Universities (2007). (July 27, 2007; May 11, 2007)
This is a beautiful example of the butterfly effect, with a single slip of the mouse leading to literally hundreds of mistakes.
QS’s book, Guide to the World’s Top Universities, was produced at the end of 2006 after the publication of the rankings for that year and contained data about student faculty ratios of over 500 ranked universities. It should have been obvious immediately that there was something wrong with this data. Yale is given a ratio of 34.1, Harvard 18, Cambridge 18.9 and Pretoria 590 .3. On the other hand, there are some ridiculously low figures such as 3.5 for Dublin Institute of Technology and 6.1 for the University of Santo Tomas (Philippines).
Sometimes the ratios given flatly contradict information given on the same page. So, on page 127 in the FACTFILE, we are told that Yale has a student faculty ratio of 34.3. Over on the left we are informed that Yale has around 10,000 students and 3,333 faculty.
There is also no relationship between the ratios and the scores out of 100 in the THES QS rankings for student faculty ratio, something that Matt Rayner asked about, without ever receiving a reply, on QS’s topuniversities web site.
So what happened? It’s very simple. Someone slipped three rows when copying and pasting data and every single student faculty ratio in the book, over 500 of them, is wrong. Dublin Institute of Technology was given Duke’s ratio (more about that later), Pretoria got Pune’s, Aachen RWT got Aberystwyth’s (Wales). And so on. Altogether over 500 errors.
Two: International Students and Faculty in Malaysian Universities.
In 2004 there was great jubilation at Universiti Malaya (UM) in Malaysia. The university had reached 89th place in the THES-QS world rankings. Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) also did very well. Then in 2005 came disaster. UM crashed 100 places, seriously damaging the Vice-Chancellor’s career, and USM disappeared from the top 200 altogether. The Malaysian political opposition had a field day blasting away at the supposed incompetence of the university leadership.
The dramatic decline should have been no surprise at all. A Malaysian blogger had already noticed that the figures for international students and faculty in 2004 were unrelated to reality. What happened was that in 2004 QS were under the impression that larger numbers of foreigners were studying and teaching at the two Malaysian universities. Actually, there were just a lot of Malaysian citizens of Indian and Chinese descent. In 2005 the error was corrected causing the scores for international faculty and students to fall precipitously.
Later, THES referred to this as “a clarification of data”, a piece of elegant British establishment obfuscation that is almost as good as “being economical with the truth”
Three: Duke’s student faculty ratio 2005 ( October 30, 2006 )
Between 2004 and 2005 Duke rose dramatically in the rankings. It did so mainly because it had been given a very low and incredible student faculty ratio in the latter year, less than two students per faculty. This was not the best ratio in the rankings. That supposedly belonged to Ecole Polytechnique in Paris (more of that later). But it was favourable enough to give Duke a powerful boost in the rankings.
The ratio was the result of a laughable error. QS listed Duke as having 6,244 faculty, well in excess of anything claimed on the university’s web site. Oddly enough, this was exactly the number of undergraduate students enrolled at Duke in the fall of 2005. Somebody evidently had copied down the figure for undergraduate students and counted them as faculty, giving Duke four times the number of faculty it should have.
Four: Duke’s student faculty ratio 2006 (December 16, 2006)
Having made a mess of Duke’s student faculty ratio in 2005, QS pulled off a truly spectacular feat in 2006 by making an even bigger mess. The problem, I suspect, was that Duke’s public relations office had its hands full with the Lacrosse rape hoax and that the web site had not been fully updated since the fall of 2005. For students, QS apparently took undergraduate student enrollment in the fall of 2005, subtracted the number of undergraduate degrees awarded and added the 2005 intake. This is a bit crude because some students would leave without taking a degree, Reade Seligmann and Colin Finnerty for example, but probably not too inaccurate. Then, there was a bit of a problem because while the number of postgraduate degrees awarded was indicated on the site there was no reference to postgraduate admissions. So, QS seem to have deducted the degrees awarded and added what they thought was number of postgraduate students admitted, 300 of them, to the Pratt School of Engineering, which is an undergraduate, not a graduate school. Then, in a final flourish they calculated the number of faculty by doubling the figure on the Duke site, apparently because Duke listed the same number classified first by department and then by status.
The result was that the number of students was undercounted and the number of faculty seriously overcounted, giving Duke the best student faculty ratio for the year. Although the ratio was higher than in 2005 Duke was now in first place for this section because QS had calculated more realistic ratios for the Ecole Polytechnique and the Ecole Normale Superieure.
Five: Omission of Kenan Flagler from the Fortune business school rankings. (March 05, 2007)
On the surface this was a trivial error compared to some that QS has committed. They got the business school at the University of North Carolina mixed up with that of North Carolina State University. The grossness of this error is that while most American universities seem unconcerned about the things that QS writes or does not write about them, business schools evidently feel that more is at stake and also have considerable influence over the magazines and newspaper that publish rankings. Kenan-Flagler protested vociferously over its omission, Fortune pulled the ranking off its site, Nunzio Quacquarelli, director of QS, explained that it was the result of a lapse by a junior employee and stated that this sort of thing had never happened before and would never happen again.
Six: "Beijing University"
China’s best or second best university is Peking University. The name has not been changed to Beijing University apparently to avoid confusion with Beijing Normal University. There are also over twenty specialist universities in Beijing: Traditional Chinese Medicine, Foreign Languages, Aeronautics and so on.
In 2004 and 2005 THES and QS referred to Beijing University finally correcting it to Peking University in 2006.
This was perhaps not too serious an error except that it revealed something about QS’s knowledge of its own sources and procedures.
In November 2005. Nunzio Quacquarelli went to a meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Much of the meeting was about the international students and faculty at UM and USM. There was apparently also a question about how Beijing University could have got such a magnificent score on the peer review while apparently producing almost no research. The correct answer would have been that QS was trying to find research written by scholars at Beijing University, which does not exist. Quacquarelli, however, answered that “we just couldn’t find the research” because Beijing University academics published in Mandarin (Kuala Lumpur New Straits Times 20/11/05).
This is revealing because QS’s “peer review” is actually nothing more than a survey of the subscribers to World Scientific, a Singapore-based company that publishes academic books and journals, many of them Asia-orientated and mostly written in English. World Scientific has very close ties with Peking University. If Quacquarelli knew very much about the company that produces his company’s survey he would surely have known that it had a cozy relationship with Peking University and that Chinese researchers, in the physical sciences at least, do quite a lot of publishing in English.
Seven: Student faculty ratios at Yonsei and Korea universities (November 08, 2006)
Another distinguished university administrator whose career suffered because of a QS error was of Yonsei University. This university is a rival of Korea University and was on most measures its equal or superior. But on the THES – QS rankings it was way behind, largely because of a poor student faculty ratio. As it happened, the figure given for Korea University was far too favourable and much better even than the ratio admitted by the university itself. This did not, however, help Jung Chang-Young who had to resign.
Eight: Omission of SUNY – Binghamton, Buffalo and Albany
THES and QS have apologized for omitting the British universities of Lancaster, Essex and Royal Holloway. A more serious omission is the omission of the State University of New York’s (SUNY) University Centres at Buffalo, Albany and Binghamton. SUNY has four autonomous university centres which are normally treated as independent and are now often referred to as the Universities of Buffalo and Albany and Binghamton University. THES-QS does refer to one university centre as Stony Brook University, probably being under the impression that this is the entirety of the SUNY system. Binghamton is ranked 82nd according to the USNWR and 37th among public national universities (2008). It can boast several internationally known scholars such as Melvin Dubofsky in labour history and Immanuel Wallerstein in sociology. To exclude it from the rankings while including the likes of Dublin Institute of Technology and the University of Pune is ridiculous.
Nine: Student faculty ratio at Ecole Polytechnique (September 08, 2006)
In 2005 the Ecole Polytechnique went zooming up the rankings to become the best university in continental Europe. Then in 2006 it went zooming down again. All this was s because of extraordinary fluctuations in the student faculty ratio. What happened could be determined by looking at the data on QS’s topgraduate site. Clicking on the rankings for 2005 led to the data that was used for that year (it is no longer available). There were two sets of data for students and faculty for that year, evidently one containing part-time faculty and another with only full time faculty. It seems that in 2005 part-time faculty were counted but not in 2006.
Ten: Washington University in St Louis (November 11, 2007)
This is a leading university in every respect. Yet in 2007, QS gave it a score of precisely one for citations per faculty, behind Universitas Gadjah Mada, the Dublin Institute of Technology and Politecnico di Milano and sent it falling from 48th to 161st in the overall rankings. What happened was that QS got mixed up with the University of Washington (in Seattle) and gave all WUSL’s citations to the latter school.
Friday, February 22, 2008
More on Cambridge and Harvard
Alejandro Pisanty has an interesting comment on the previous post. I will reproduce a large part of here.
“In particular for Harvard it's darn tricky. "Harvard University" will
yield only a fraction of the production and the citations from there.
There's also Harvard Medical School, Harvard Business School, Harvard
Law School, etc., and nifty arrangements like Harvard-Smisthsonian
Astronomy Project (also in Cambridge MA; surely a half-floor of a physics or
astronomy unit in the best of cases) and so on.
QS and THES admit quite cynically that they don't really know too well
how to treat "children institutions". One can be sure that officials from
Harvard and Cambridge, and all British universities, have been well on
top of this by constant contact with QS and their staff. And, it all
happens in English.
One would reasonably excpect that QS does not apply the same care to
Malaysian or Mexican universities...”
The number of papers produced by the Harvard Business and Law Schools is relatively small although still a lot more than the Judge School of Business at Cambridge or Addenbrookes Hospital. Harvard Medical School, however, does produce a massive number of papers, over 35,000 according to Scopus between 2002 and 2006. Compare this with 12, 736 for "Harvard University" over the same period.
If QS did indeed count the papers produced by authors with a Harvard Medical School affiliation this would be an adequate -- probably more than adequate -- explanation for Harvard’s superiority over Cambridge in terms of citations. But another problem now arises. The number of citations per faculty would now be much larger than Caltech which does a bit better than Harvard in the THES-QS citations per faculty section.
It is possible that QS included the papers produced by HMS and then also counted " about [sic}10,674 medical school faculty". Not to do so would be absurd since any other procedure would mean that linguists, sociologists and engineers were getting credit for producing medical research.
But if QS counted papers with a Harvard Medical School affiliation and also counted all the medical faculty then we would be back where we started.
It still seems to me that the most plausible reconstruction of Harvard’s citations per faculty score is that QS did not count papers produced by the various schools, or least not by the Harvard Medical School, and that for the faculty figure they used the number given on the Harvard website or in QS’s school profile.
All this speculation would be unnecessary if QS told us exactly what they did but I wouldn’t bother waiting for that to happen.
Alejandro Pisanty has an interesting comment on the previous post. I will reproduce a large part of here.
“In particular for Harvard it's darn tricky. "Harvard University" will
yield only a fraction of the production and the citations from there.
There's also Harvard Medical School, Harvard Business School, Harvard
Law School, etc., and nifty arrangements like Harvard-Smisthsonian
Astronomy Project (also in Cambridge MA; surely a half-floor of a physics or
astronomy unit in the best of cases) and so on.
QS and THES admit quite cynically that they don't really know too well
how to treat "children institutions". One can be sure that officials from
Harvard and Cambridge, and all British universities, have been well on
top of this by constant contact with QS and their staff. And, it all
happens in English.
One would reasonably excpect that QS does not apply the same care to
Malaysian or Mexican universities...”
The number of papers produced by the Harvard Business and Law Schools is relatively small although still a lot more than the Judge School of Business at Cambridge or Addenbrookes Hospital. Harvard Medical School, however, does produce a massive number of papers, over 35,000 according to Scopus between 2002 and 2006. Compare this with 12, 736 for "Harvard University" over the same period.
If QS did indeed count the papers produced by authors with a Harvard Medical School affiliation this would be an adequate -- probably more than adequate -- explanation for Harvard’s superiority over Cambridge in terms of citations. But another problem now arises. The number of citations per faculty would now be much larger than Caltech which does a bit better than Harvard in the THES-QS citations per faculty section.
It is possible that QS included the papers produced by HMS and then also counted " about [sic}10,674 medical school faculty". Not to do so would be absurd since any other procedure would mean that linguists, sociologists and engineers were getting credit for producing medical research.
But if QS counted papers with a Harvard Medical School affiliation and also counted all the medical faculty then we would be back where we started.
It still seems to me that the most plausible reconstruction of Harvard’s citations per faculty score is that QS did not count papers produced by the various schools, or least not by the Harvard Medical School, and that for the faculty figure they used the number given on the Harvard website or in QS’s school profile.
All this speculation would be unnecessary if QS told us exactly what they did but I wouldn’t bother waiting for that to happen.
Monday, December 24, 2007
The THES-QS rankings can be viewed as a collection of complex interweaving narratives. There is the rise of
The most interesting narrative is that of British universities -- Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial and University Colleges, London -- steadily coming closer to Harvard and pulling ahead of Princeton, Caltech and the rest.
This particular narrative requires rather more suspension of disbelief than most. By all accounts, including the
This year methodological changes mean that the differences between
Documents 7,614
Citations 116,875
Health sciences
Citations 65,211
Physical sciences
Documents 11,514Citations 100,225
Social sciences
Documents 2,636
Citations 24,292
Total
Documents 26,170
Citations 306,603
Using the FTE faculty figure of 3,765 provided by QS on their website, we have 83 citations per faculty.
I noticed that a number of authors gave their affiliation as “
HARVARD ("Harvard University") 2002-2006
Life sciences
Documents 4,003
Citations 79,663
Health science
Documents 2,577
Citations 47,486
Physical Science
Documents 6,429
Citations 91,154
Social Science
Documents 3,686
Citations 48,844
Total
Documents 16,695
Citations 267,147
I suspect that most observers would consider Cambridge's superiority to Harvard in number of publications and citations indicative more of the bias of the database than anything else.
If we use QS’s faculty headcount figure for Harvard of 3,389 and assume that 8 per cent of these are part-timers with a quarter-time teaching load then we have 3,167 FTE faculty. This would give us 84 citations per faculty, slightly better than
The problem is, though , that QS give Harvard a score of 96 for citations per faculty and
The may be some other explanation . If so , then I would be glad to hear it.
If this is what happened then it would be interesting to know whether there was simply another run of the mill error with that ubiquitous junior staff member using two different faculty figures to calculate the two components or a cynical ploy to prevent Cambridge moving into the lead too early.Sunday, December 16, 2007
What Happened to Cardiff?
The Malaysian Star (print edition 16/12/07, E11) has a feature on Brian Smith, Vice-Chancellor of Cardiff University from 1993 to 2001. (The Star reports that he was appointed in 2001)
Professor Smith is reputed to have revitalised the research capability of Cardiff . According to the Star:
The article proceeds:
It may well be true that Cardiff researchers became more productive because of Professor Smith's policies. A quick look at the Scopus database indicates that from 1997 to 2007 the total output of research papers rose three fold.
It is also undeniable that Cardiff rose to 99th place in the THES-QS rankings this year.
It does not, however, follow that those two facts had anything to do with each other. For a start, one wonders why the rankings should detect the improvement in research only in 2007 and not in 2005 or 2006.
What really happened?
In 2006 Cardiff scored reasonably well on the "peer review" (151th out of the overall top 400 universities), employer review (91st), student faculty ratio (111th), international faculty (116th), international students (111th) but miserably on citations per faculty (253th).
In 2007 Cardiff did better on the "peer review", rising to 129th but worse on the employer review , falling to 250th. The other criteria were pretty much the same: 138th for student faculty ratio, 106th for international faculty, 110th for international students and 269th for citations per faculty.
It seems that Cardiff's remarkable improvement between 2006 and 2007 resulted from getting many more points for citations, 65 in 2007 as against 6 in 2006. This is far greater than any improvement resulting from a new database and is almost certainly caused by the introduction of Z scores this year.
What happened was that in 2006 Cardiff was doing OK on most measures but badly on research. In 2007 it was still doing OK on most measures , except for the employer review, and still doing badly for research. But in 2007 because of the smoothing of the curve, it got a lot more points for the limited amount of research that it did.
The rise of Cardiff is largely an illusion created by a change in method.
The Malaysian Star (print edition 16/12/07, E11) has a feature on Brian Smith, Vice-Chancellor of Cardiff University from 1993 to 2001. (The Star reports that he was appointed in 2001)
Professor Smith is reputed to have revitalised the research capability of Cardiff . According to the Star:
...........................................................................Said Prof Smith: “Cardiff offered a fantastic opportunity.
“Here was a university that had been through very difficult times; it was the perfect opportunity to try out my theories.
“And they worked because the people at Cardiff were ready for change and ready to change dramatically.”
The main problem faced by the university at that time was that it had not yet re-established itself as a research university.
According to Prof Smith, there are a number of factors involved in the move to regain a university's research strength.
“A very big factor is research staff.
“Because British universities have a great deal of autonomy and flexibility, we were able to go out and recruit.”
And that was how Prof Sir Martin Evans, one of this year's Nobel Prize in Medicine recipients, came to join the university.
“He came to a department that was not strong but actually managed to increase its number of publications in top journals 11-fold,” said Prof Smith.
Asked how he managed to attract top people like Prof Evans to join him at Cardiff, Prof Smith said he believed what counted was not just a lucrative contract but the whole package.
“I don't think it's entirely about money. I feel that Prof Evans was equally attracted by the opportunity to unify the entire biology department and direct its vision,” he observed.
To encourage productivity, Prof Smith switched the promotion system from a quota-based system (where the total number of professorial positions in a faculty were pre-determined) to a performance-based one.
He even offered an attractive retirement package to faculty members who were not producing much research.
However, in order for universities to be able to do that, Prof Smith said they need autonomy.
“The university has to be free to offer different contracts (to academics and scientists).
“And within the university, a lot of power needs to be devolved to the young people.
“It's all about having decisions taken at the lowest level practicable.
“That’s a major change,” he said.
The article proceeds:
Due in large part to these strategies, Cardiff has risen from a ranking of 241 in the THES-QS World University Rankings in 2005 to 99 this year.
It may well be true that Cardiff researchers became more productive because of Professor Smith's policies. A quick look at the Scopus database indicates that from 1997 to 2007 the total output of research papers rose three fold.
It is also undeniable that Cardiff rose to 99th place in the THES-QS rankings this year.
It does not, however, follow that those two facts had anything to do with each other. For a start, one wonders why the rankings should detect the improvement in research only in 2007 and not in 2005 or 2006.
What really happened?
In 2006 Cardiff scored reasonably well on the "peer review" (151th out of the overall top 400 universities), employer review (91st), student faculty ratio (111th), international faculty (116th), international students (111th) but miserably on citations per faculty (253th).
In 2007 Cardiff did better on the "peer review", rising to 129th but worse on the employer review , falling to 250th. The other criteria were pretty much the same: 138th for student faculty ratio, 106th for international faculty, 110th for international students and 269th for citations per faculty.
It seems that Cardiff's remarkable improvement between 2006 and 2007 resulted from getting many more points for citations, 65 in 2007 as against 6 in 2006. This is far greater than any improvement resulting from a new database and is almost certainly caused by the introduction of Z scores this year.
What happened was that in 2006 Cardiff was doing OK on most measures but badly on research. In 2007 it was still doing OK on most measures , except for the employer review, and still doing badly for research. But in 2007 because of the smoothing of the curve, it got a lot more points for the limited amount of research that it did.
The rise of Cardiff is largely an illusion created by a change in method.
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Comment on the THES-QS Rankings
There is an excellent article by Andrew Oswald of Warwick University in yesterday's Independent. It is worth quoting a large chunk of it here.
There is an excellent article by Andrew Oswald of Warwick University in yesterday's Independent. It is worth quoting a large chunk of it here.
First, 2007 saw the release, by a UK commercial organisation, of an unpersuasive world university ranking. This put Oxford and Cambridge at equal second in the world. Lower down, at around the bottom of the world top-10, came University College London, above MIT. A university with the name of Stanford appeared at number 19 in the world. The University of California at Berkeley was equal to Edinburgh at 22 in the world.
Such claims do us a disservice. The organisations who promote such ideas should be unhappy themselves, and so should any supine UK universities who endorse results they view as untruthful. Using these league table results on your websites, universities, if in private you deride the quality of the findings, is unprincipled and will ultimately be destructive of yourselves, because if you are not in the truth business what business are you in, exactly?
Worse, this kind of material incorrectly reassures the UK government that our universities are international powerhouses.
Let us instead, a bit more coolly, do what people in universities are paid to do. Let us use reliable data to try to discern the truth. In the last 20 years, Oxford has won no Nobel Prizes. (Nor has Warwick.) Cambridge has done only slightly better. Stanford University in the United States, purportedly number 19 in the world, garnered three times as many Nobel Prizes over the past two decades as the universities of Oxford and Cambridge did combined. Worryingly, this period since the mid 1980s coincides precisely with the span over which UK universities have had to go through government Research Assessment Exercises (RAEs). To hide away from such inconvenient data is not going to do our nation any good. If John Denham, the Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills, is reading this, perhaps, as well as doing his best to question the newspapers that print erroneous world league tables, he might want to cut out these last sentences, blow them up to 100 point font, and paste them horizontally in a red frame on his bedroom ceiling, so that he sees them every time he wakes up or gets distracted from other duties. In his shoes, or out of them, this decline would be my biggest concern.
Since the 1980s the UK's Nobel-Prize performance has fallen off. Over the last 20 years, the US has been awarded 126 Nobel Prizes compared to Britain's nine.
The THES-QS rankings have done great damage to university education in Asia and Australia where they have distorted national education policies, promoted an emphasis on research at the expenses of teaching and induced panic about non-existent decline in some countries while encouraging false complacency about quality in others.
In the United Kingdom they have generally been taken as proof that British universities are the equals of the Ivy League and Californian universities, a claim that is plausible only if the rankings' numerous errors, biases and fluctuations are ignored.
I hope that Chris Patten and others who are in denial about the comparative of British universities will read Professor Oswald's article.
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Student Faculty Ratios
Something especially striking about the THES~QS rankings this year is that British universities have done spectacularly well overall while getting miserable scores, comparatively speaking, on the citations section. We have to remember that this component does not measure the absolute numbers of citations but the number per faculty. It is then worth investigating whether the high score for student faculty ratios are the result of inflated faculty numbers which have also led to a reduced score for citations per faculty. First, I want to look at the faculty data for the top British and American universities.
The QS site indicates that Imperial has 2,963 FTE faculty and 12,025 FTE students (data entered by Saad Shabbir 21/08/07), a ratio of 3.03.
The Harvard site, however, refers to a much smaller number of faculty, 2,497 non-medical faculty and to 20,042 students, making a ratio of 8.0.The USNWR indicates a ratio of 7 for Harvard (2005).
Something strange about QS’s data is that it refers to a headcount of 13,078 and 3,593 FTE undergraduates. This is something that definitely needs explaining.
Yale
According to the Yale site, there are 3,384 faculty and 11,358 students, a ratio of 3.4. (All figures from the 2006-7 academic year.)
For the fall of 2006 the faculty headcount included:
Tenured faculty 906
Term 966
Nonladder 903
Research 609
The USNWR ratio for Yale is 6.
According to QS, the faculty headcount was 1,263 (entered by Baerbel Eckelmann 09/07/07). The number of students was 6,708 by headcount and 6,795 FTE. The headcount ratio is 5.3
This means, very ironically, that this measure, which is supposed to be a proxy for teaching quality, is to a large extent a reflection of a university’s commitment to research since the employment of large numbers of researchers, or even librarians and computer programmers, would lead to an improvement in this ratio.
It also looks as though leading British universities are favoured disproportionately by this procedure although a definite conclusion would have to wait more extensive analysis.
I think that we can put forward a working hypothesis that British universities have been ascribed inflated faculty numbers and that this contributes to high scores for teaching quality as measured by student faculty radio and to low scores for research as measured by citations per faculty.
Sunday, December 09, 2007
Macquarie Update
Here is a little bit about Steven Schwartz, Vice-Chancellor of Macquarie University, that I just came across at Wikipedia.
Schwartz was named one of the 100 highest cited researchers in his field and he received many recognitions including a World Health Organisation
Fellowship, a NATO fellowship and the Australian Academy of Science-Royal
Society (London) Exchange Fellowship. He was elected by his peers to the
Academy of Social Sciences and he was elected Morris Leibovitz Fellow at the University of Southern California. Schwartz is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, the Australian Institute of Company Directors, and the Australian Institute of
Management. He was a visiting Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford and he won
the Brain Research Award of the British Red Cross Society. He was
elected the first President of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society in
Australia and was awarded the distinguished Career Scientist Award by the
National Institutes of Health. He served on the editorial boards of many
scientific journals and was a fellow of many learned societies.
I assume that Wikipedia is not in error and that Dr. Schwartz does in fact have a highly distinguished research and academic record.
It is therefore very surprising that Dr. Schwartz, has apparently shown an extreme degree of carelessness. He has stated in the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) that Macquarie University's fall in this year's THES-QS rankings was because there was a change in the weighting that the rankings gave to the international students section. He also said that this was the reason for LSE's fall.
At the risk of being repetitive, let me point out again that the weighting of the international students section has nothing to do with Macquarie's fall. It was five per cent in 2004 , 2005 and 2006 and in 2007. LSE fell because the consultants began using Z scores this year. This is a common statistical technique that has the effect of smoothing out scores. LSE fell, not because of the any change in the weighting but because other universities lagging behind on this measure got more points this year and therefore overtook LSE on the overall ranking.
I will repeat again that Macquarie fell in the rankings firstly because of a poor showing, like several other Australian universities, on the "peer review". This might have resulted from fewer responses from Australian universities this year or from respondents not being allowed to vote for their own universities or a combination of the two.
There was also a fall in its placing for international faculty. The overall effect of this limited by the small weighting given to this criterion.
There was a fall in the citations per faculty section matched by a similar rise in the student faculty ratio. These two changes, which effectively cancelled each other out, might have been caused by a decrease in the reported number of faculty which would have a good effect on citations per faculty and a bad effect on the student faculty ratio.
It is also possible that the high score for international faculty in 2006 might also have resulted from a low reported figure for total faculty.
I would like to ask a few questions.
Did Dr Schwartz read the THES' s description of its methodology?
If he did, did he really misunderstand the description?
Dr Schwartz is reported to get a bonus of A$100,000 when Macqaurie rises in the rankings. Why did this not encourage him to read about the methodology of the rankings carefully?
Why did SMH allow Dr Schwartz to publish an article in which he criticised the the newspaper for not referring to this change of rankings, when there is in fact no such change?
Will SMH point out to Dr Schwartz that there was no change in the weuighting and request an apology from him?
Will Dr Schwartz investigate how QS gave Macquarie such a high and presumably incorrect score for international faculty in 2006?
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