Dumbed Down Degrees

This is from today's Observer

"Universities were yesterday embroiled in a furious row over dumbing down after a parliamentary inquiry revealed the number of first-class degrees had almost doubled in a decade. Amid the war of words, senior Tories vowed to publish data that they claimed would reveal the true value of degrees.

Different universities demand "different levels of effort" from students to get similar degrees, according to the report from the commons select committee on innovation, universities and skills, suggesting that top grades from some colleges were not worth the same as others. "

And what is the cause of this grade inflation?

"Gillian Evans, a lecturer in mediaeval theology at Oxford University and an expert in university regulation, attributed the rise to universities' desire to move up published league tables.
"I am quite sure the reason proportions have gone up is exactly the same as the reasons A-levels have gone up: it's straightforward grade inflation, chasing a place in league tables," she said."

Highlights from the New Webometrics Rankings

Top USA and Canada

1. MIT
2. Harvard
3. Stanford
4. Berkeley
5. Cornell


Top Europe

1. Cambridge
2. Oxford
3. Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zurich
4. University College London
5. University of Helsinki

Top Oceana

1. Australian National University
2. University of Queensland
3. Monash University
4. University of Melbourne
5. University of Sydney

Top South East Asia

1. National University of Singapore
2. Prince of Songkhla University
3. Chulalongkorn University
4. Kasetsart Universiy
5. Mahidol University

Top Arab World

1. King Saud University
2. King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals
3. Imam Muhamed bin Saud University
4. King Faisal University
5. King Abdulaziz university

Webometrics Rankings

This is from Ranking Web of Universities

"The July edition of the Ranking Web of World Universities (http://www.webometrics.info) shows important news. Most of them are due to changes done to improve the academic impact of the open web contents and to reduce the geographical bias of search engines. As a result, the US universities still lead the Ranking (MIT with its huge Open Courseware is again the first, followed by Harvard, Stanford and Berkeley), but the digital gap with their European counterparts (Cambridge and Oxford are in the region’s top) has been reduced. Even more important, some of the developing countries institutions reach high ranks, especially in Latin America where the University of Sao Paulo (38th) and UNAM (44th) benefits from the increasingly interconnected Brazilian and Mexican academic webspaces.Several countries improves their performance including Taiwan and Saudi Arabia with strong web oriented strategies, Czech Republic (Charles), the leader for Eastern Europe, Spain (Complutense) and Portugal (Minho, Porto) with huge repositories and strong Open Access initiatives. Norway (NTNU, Oslo), Egypt could be also mentioned.On the other side, the underrated are headed by France, with a very fragmented system, Korea, whose student-oriented websites are frequently duplicated, New Zealand, India or Argentina.Africa is still monopolized by South African universities (Cape Town is the first, 405th), as well as Australian Universities are the best ranked for Oceania (Australian National University, 77th)Other well performing institutions include Cornell or Caltech in the USA, Tokyo (24th) Toronto (28th), Hong Kong (91st), or Peking (104th). On the contrary, in positions below expected we find Yale, Princeton, Saint Petersburg, Seoul and the Indian Institutes of Science or Technology."

Ranking Schools by Salary

The Payscale site has produced a ranking of American schools and colleges by the salaries that its graduates earn.

Here are the top five engineering colleges by median mid-career salary:

1. MIT
2. Harvey Mudd
3. Stanford
4. Bucknell University
5. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

the top five Ivy League schools;

1. Dartmouth College
2. Harvard
3. Princeton
4. Yale
5. University of Pennsylvania


the top five liberal arts colleges;

1. Colgate University
2. Bucknell University
3. Swarthmore University
4. Amherst College
5. Haverford College

and the top five state universities;

1. Berkeley
2. Colorado School of Mines
3. Georgia Institute of Technology
4. New Jersey Institute of technology
5. University of California at San Diego.

What does Internationalisation Mean?

In THE-QS rankings universities get 10 per cent for the proportion of international students and international faculty. Does this measure say anything about the quality of a university?

Maybe. But one thing it says something about is simply the size of the country in which the university is located. There is a moderate negative correlation between the score for international faculty of the top 400 universities in the 2008 rankings and population of .332 and of .326 between international students and population.

This may help to explain why Hong Kong universities have been doing so well lately compared with those in Mainland China.

The Paris Rankings are out

L'Ecole des Mines de Paris has produced its third Professional Ranking of World Universities. This is based solely on the number of CEOs of Fortune's top 500 companies. The top 5 in order are Tokyo, Harvard, Stanford, Waseda and Seoul national universities. Five French schools are in the top 20 and in general France performs much better on these rankings than any other, which, one suspects, might be the whole point of the enterprise.

According to University World News

Interviewed in the online higher education publication Educpros, Nicolas Cheimanoff, director of studies of Mines Paris
Tech, explained the aims of the rankings: "In France we were challenged into taking action, to say we could not base arguments exclusively on the Shanghai ranking and construct higher education policy solely on this ranking.

"We wanted to show at an international level that France is a country where you can study. Our ranking gives visibility to a school, but also to the system of French higher education as a whole."Cheimanoff said Mines Paris Tech had been in contact with Professor Liu, originator of the Shanghai rankings, to suggest Jiao Tong should incorporate the Mines crterion. "He was a priori in favour but only if we included the academic careers of company heads since 1920 as he did for
the Nobel prizewinners. But that's totally impossible."

The Paris rankings do correlate quite well with others indicating they are measuring some sort of quality. However, the performance of French, Japanese and Korean schools may say more about the recruitment and immigration policies of their countries than anything else.

Also, one wonders whether producing the CEO of General Motors is indicative of the real quality of Duke and Harvard.

The frightening thing is that it probably is.

A Ranking System for the Philippines

Another national ranking system is on the way.

The Commission on Higher Education (Ched) will come up with a ranking system of the best schools in specific fields of study or discipline, an official said today.

“We may come up (with the ranking system) within the
year,” said Ched executive director Julito Vitriolo said in a phone
interview. As of the moment, Vitriolo said Ched is now compiling the
licensure examination results on different fields of study in various colleges and universities nationwide.

See here for more.

IREG-4

Presentations from the fourth International Rankings Expert Group Conference in Astana, Kazakhstan, are available here.

Is There a q Factor in University Ranking?

Although the Shanghai rankings show a high correlation with other rankings (based on a tiny sample of US universities) the HEEACT rankings from Taiwan (Performance Ranking for Scientific Papers for World Universities) do somewhat better. The correlation with THE-QS is .740, the Shanghai ARWU .984, the USNWR America's best Colleges .711, Professional Ranking of World Universities .920 and the Center for College Affordability and Productivity .700.

All these rankings measure diffent things. The USNWR measures a variety of indicators related directly or indirectly to the quality of instruction, the CCAP is quite definitely a consumer-orintated ranking, the THES-QS World University Rankings are largely a measure of research performance (reputational survey, citations per faculty and student faculty ratio where researchers are counted in the faculty), the Professional Renking of World Universities counts CEOs of top companies while the Shanghai and Taiwan rankings focus entirely on research, mainly in the natural sciences.

The ability of the Taiwan rankings to predict scores on the other rankings suggests that underlying various measures of university quality is a single q factor, the average intelligence of its faculty. If there is one single number that would tell you about the general quality of a school than it would probably be the average IQ of the faculty, although performance on standardised tests, publications and citations (especially in the hard sciences) and postgraduate degrees might be goood proxies. The strength of the Taiwan rankings would be their focus on research productivity alone.

Incidently, if anyone from HEEACT reads this, please think of a new name for your rankings. PROSPWU is not exactly a memorable acronym.

Ranking the Rankings

University rankings are popping up everywhere. So how do they compare with one another? One way is to check the correlation between the total scores of the rankings. Here, correlations have been calculated for the scores of ten US universities (every tenth university in the Shanghai rankings excluding those not in the THE-QS top 400).

It seems that the Shanghai ARWU is the most valid of five rankings Correlations for total scores are .796 with the THE-QS, .712 with the USNWR America's Best Colleges, .896 for the Professional Ranking of World Universities (Paris) and .628 for the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.

It looks like on the basis of this extremely small and unrepresentative sample that if you had to pick just one ranking to rely on then it would have to be the Shanghai ARWU.

International Rankings Expert Group Conference in Kazakhstan

I have just returned from the International Rankings Expert Group’s fourth conference in Astana, Kazakstan. There were some positive developments at the conference but also a few disappointments.

Starting with the negative aspects, there seems to be a global trend to the proliferation of national rankings which are increasingly and unnecessarily detailed and which impose a serious burden on teachers and researchers.. A case in point is the new ranking produced for Kazakhstan which includes just about every variable imaginable from "the number of Dissertation Councils" to "the availabilty of medical centers, sport halls, preventoriums, recreation zones". Very few at the conference seemed aware of the backwash effect of the rankings boom as universities outside the top 500 create their own rankings or compete for irrelevant awards, medals or certificates. Drudges in the periphery of the world university system now face an endless round of form filling, office tidying, meetings, committees and professional development activities which make teaching difficult and genuine research, as opposed to research-like behaviour, close to impossible.

The European Union ranking project was presented in some detail but I suspect is going to make little impact since it appears largely concerned with making fine distinctions between the research capabilities of faculties and departments.

There was a presentation about the Lisbon project which proposed to ignore research altogether and measure teaching excellence. This is an interesting idea but it seems to miss two important points. One reason for emphasizing the measurement of research is that the qualities required for research, general cognitive ability, reading and writing skills, conscientiousness and interest in a subject also correlate to some extent with teaching ability, however that is measured. Also, the assumption that learning is dependent on teaching which in turn must be regulated by a centralized bureaucracy is surely false, at least for the more able students

Positive developments include a trend towards personalized rankings where consumers assign their own weighting to indicators. There is an interesting project under way in Taiwan.

Richard Vedder introduced a ranking that has the merit of being based largely on publicly accessible data. The basic idea is excellent but there are some issues to be dealt with. Using RateMyProfessors is not a bad way to assess the quality of teaching but to be really valid there needs to be some adjustment for the grades awarded by the instructor. Using the American Who’s Who is also potentially interesting – and could well be applied internationally -- but there are of course obvious issues of bias.

He also gave a presentation without using PowerPoint. I must remember that next time I fill in a form about my innovative teaching methodology.

One measure presented was to create an IREG seal of approval. The logo is ready. I am not sure though whether this is going to be effective.

Overall, the conference has strengthened my conviction that if ranking is to be done it should not be by administrators or businesses but by universities themselves.

A New Atlantic Alliance?

Recently, the US News and World Report expanded its rankings portfolio to include the World’s 100 Best Universities. This turned out to be nothing more than the THE-QS World University Rankings with a rebranding for the US market. Now the USNWR has gone a step further and produced a list of the world’s top 400 universities along with sundry regional and subject rankings. Once again, this is the QS rankings with a new name.

This is no doubt a shrewd move for QS who are now marketing their rankings on both sides of the Atlantic and appear to be on the way to establishing a near monopoly over the international ranking business. It could, however, be risky for USNWR. People are bound to wonder why it should link up with a company that has a history of errors where American universities are concerned. In 2007 QS got their North Carolina business schools mixed up and as a result caused Fortune magazine to withdraw its business school rankings based on QS data. Will US students and stakeholders forgive the USNWR if its data includes things like a near zero for research for Washington University in St Louis or an unbelievably good score for Duke for student faculty ratio?

An Alternative Global Ranking

This is from GLOBALHIGHERED.

Finally the decision on who has won the European Commission’s million euro tender – to develop and test a global ranking of universities – has been announced.

The successful bid – the CHERPA network (or the Consortium for Higher Education and Research Performance Assessment), is charged with developing a ranking system to overcome what is regarded by the European Commission as the limitations of the Shanghai Jiao Tong and the QS-Times Higher Education schemes. The final product is to be launched in 2011.

CHERPA is comprised of a consortium of leading institutions in the field within Europe; all have been developing and offering rather different approaches to ranking over the past few years (see our earlier stories here, here and here for some of the potential contenders):CHE – Centre for Higher Education Development (Gütersloh, Germany)Center for Higher Education Policy Studies (CHEPS) at the University of Twente (Netherlands)Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University (Netherlands)Research division INCENTIM at the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium)Observatoire des Sciences et des Techniques (OST) in ParisEuropean Federation of National Engineering Associations (FEANI)European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD)

Rankings do matter

One of the most dangersous things about university rankings is that they are becoming -- in parts of Asia at any rate -- symbols of national grandeur or decline, attracting almost as much public concern and interest as the World Cup.

Dr Hsu has an interesting post on the divergent histories of Singapore and Malaysia that contains this comment:

Incidentally, I think this university ranking [almost certainly he means THE-QS] can be taken as representative of everything comparative among the 2 countries.

Publish and Pay

There is a growing trend towards open access academic publishing where researchers have to pay for publication. Open access is in principle a good idea but the idea of authors rather than subscribers footing the bill has its dangers.

Firstly, it poses a threat to new academic journals in emerging countries. There are, I suspect quite a few researchers who would find it more convenient to spend a few hundred dollars, especially if comes out of grant money, for speedy and "prestigious" international publication rather than writing for a local journal with limited impact.

Secondly, there is a definite threat to standards if criteria for publication are to relaxed or perhaps even abandoned altogether. 

Recently, Philip Davis and Kent Anderson sent a totally nonsensical computer generated paper to the Open Information Science Journal. It was accepted, supposedly after peer review, with a request for the payment of $800 in author's fees. In this case, at least, the peer review process had apparently been dropped altogther.

For more information see The Scientist and the "authors'" blog, The Scholarly Kitchen.

In all fairness, it must be pointed out that another computer generated paper submitted to another journal run by the same company journal was rejected and that one reviewer at least figured out what was going on.

Still, this does have disturbing implications. If publication becomes influenced or even determined by ability to pay then we are heading for the complete corruption of the peer review system.

It would be a good idea if universities refused to consider articles in pay for publication journals as evidence for selection or promotion. Perhaps also, Scopus and other databases could list such journals in a separate category.

Anyway, here is an extract from the first paper:

"In this section, we discuss existing research into red-black trees, vacuum tubes, and courseware [10]. On a similar note, recent work by Takahashi suggests a methodology for providing robust modalities, but does not offer an implementation [9]."

 

 

Ranking the Rankings

University rankings are popping everywhere now. It is time to start comparing them with each other. First, here are the number of results from a Yahoo! search using the official names of the rankings. In the lead is the THE-QS World University Rankings, followed by the USNWR America's Best Colleges. The Shanghai rankings have made a much smaller impact and the Webometrics rankings even less. No doubt a search in languages other than English would lead to different results as would a search using different names.

Still, it seems that in the webosphere THE-QS have a strong lead among the international rankings.

"World University Rankings" (THES-QS) 942,000
"America's Best Colleges" (US News and World Report) 892,000
"Times Good University Guide" (UK) 252,000
"Academic Ranking of World Universities" (Shanghai) 123,000
"Guardian Good University Guide" (UK) 87,300
"Maclean's University Rankings" (Canada) 14,200
"World University Ranking on the Web" (Webometrics) 9,890
"CHE/Die Zeit University Ranking" (Germany) 4,570
"Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities" (Taiwan) 2,120

Is this an error?

According to the QS.com ranking of Asian universities, the best university in Asia for Student/Faculty Ratio is "College of Medicine, Pochon Cha University". (it seems that it is actually Pochon CHA, with CHA being the name of a private medical conglomerate).

This is a little odd since the institution is clearly a single subject one and therefore presumably should not have been included in the rankings at all. This was the rationale for the University of California at San Francisco being removed after a brief appearance in the world rankings.

It is possible though that QS has different requirements for being included in the world and the regional rankings. If this is the case then countries can now use a new strategy for getting excellent scores in the rankings. Just designate medical schools or faculties as independent universities. They will get good scores for publications and citations since medical researchers tend to publish short articles that are cited more frequently and more quickly than in other disciplines and for student/faculty ratio since they have a lot of clinical faculty who can be added to the faculty totals.

It will be interesting to see how long Pochon CHA University remains in the Asian rankings or whether it will appear in the forthcoming world rankings.

Not a Good Start

The Malaysian government has awarded Universiti Sains Malaysia the coverted APEX University status, meaning that it gets a lot of money to try and get in the top 100 world. universities.

Unfortunately, things went wrong last Friday when the university's website informed 8,000 plus students that they had been accepted. In fact, only 3,599 had been and it took 24 hours for the university to correct the error. Not a good start but it will probably boost USM's scores in the Webometrics rankings.

See Education in Malaysia for more coverage

Ranking News

The European Union is planning on introducing a rival to the Shanghai and THES-QS rankings. This is a good idea in principle but who is going to get the contract? It is a pity that "internationalisation" is going to be an indicator and what exactly does "community outreach" mean?

Odile Quintin, the European Commission's director-general for education, told the HES that the Shanghai Jiao Tong was "firmly concentrated on research", anchored to the production of Nobel laureates, and narrow in scope.

"We think that universities have a strong role in research but also in teaching and employability so we are promoting an alternative ranking to measure all these dimensions," she said.

The ranking would be handled by a consortium working independently of the EC, and work would begin after the results of a tendering process were revealed next week.

The plan is to develop the ranking throughout 2009 and 2010, for implementation a
year later. The project will have a budget of E1.1 million ($1.9m).

Ms Quintin said the new ranking, while based in Europe, would have a global reach.
She added that the new European survey would be focused much more on
disciplinary strength, "because you can be the best university in nanotechnology
but not in psychology".

She said the alternative world ranking system would be independent, run neither by governments nor universities and provide a multidimensional measure of education, research, innovation, internationalisation and community outreach.

Asian University Rankings

QS Quacquarelli Symonds has come out with a ranking of the top 200 Asian universities. Here is the top ten.

1. University of Hong Kong
2. Chinese University of Hong Kong
3. University of Tokyo
4. Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
5. Kyoto University
6. Osaka University
7. Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
8. Seoul National University
9. Tokyo Institute of Technology
10. National University of Singapore and Peking University


There are also rankings by disciplinary cluster and by indicator.

For every single disciplinary cluster, the University of Tokyo, not the University of Hong Kong is top. How strange.

For the indicators, the National University of Singapore is first for Employer Review and International Students, Tokyo University for Academic Peer Review, College of Medicine at Pochon Cha University (Korea) for faculty student ratio [I’m wondering about that as well], Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology for papers per faculty, Yokohama City University for Citations per Paper, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology for International Faculty, Kansai Gaidai for Inbound Exchange Students and City University of Hong Kong for Outbound Exchange Students.


These rankings seem to be a shrewd marketing move. Universities that have no chance of getting anywhere in the World University Rankings will now be able to boast that they came in the top 50 Asian universities for outbound exchange students or top 100 for citations per paper. A glance at the indicator rankings, for example, shows some Malaysian universities that one would not have thought had any chance of being in any sort of ranking. On the other hand, these rankings have been able to identify rising stars such as the Multi Media University.

There are two methodological innovations, both of which are questionable. They need to be discussed since this regional ranking could be a tryout for the global rankings. The first is the addition of two further measures of internationalization, inbound and outbound exchange students.

If internationalization is going to be a criterion, then having more measures might be a good idea. However, it is time to consider whether internationalization is actually a valid indicator of quality. Measures of internationalization do not correlate very well if at all with any other indicator and they also give an unfair advantage to the European Union and Hong Kong.

If we want to measure faculty quality, which internationalization supposedly underlies, a better method might be calculate the percentage of a random sample of teaching and research staff on university web pages who obtained degrees from the top 100 universities (on the Shanghai rankings?).

However, since QS get a lot of their bread and butter from facilitating students moving across national boundaries we are unlikely to see the end of this indicator.

The addition of number of inbound and outbound exchange students might also be very easily manipulated. If it were included in the world rankings it is likely that we will see universities setting up branch campuses a few miles away across some increasingly irrelevant frontier and then moving everybody there for their second year and calling them exchange students. So we might expect to see Queens University Belfast setting up a branch in Dundalk in the Irish Republic or the National University of Singapore in Johore in Malaysia and so on.

The other innovation is that research is measured by citations per paper, which measures the average impact of papers, and papers per faculty which measures the quantity of research in a very basic sense. This represents an improvement over the previous policy of using a single indicator. However, the problem remains that both are based on the Scopus database which aims to be as inclusive as possible. Scopus is an excellent research tool but inclusion in its database is an indicator of quality only in the broadest sense. To be credible, QS should consider finding some measure of research that measures genuine excellence.

These rankings have some surprises, the most noticeable and one lacking in face validity, is that the University of Hong Kong and not the University of Tokyo is the top university in Asia. Or perhaps this should not really be a surprise. Tokyo actually outperforms Hong Kong on all indicators except the internationalization ones and is ahead in all of the disciplinary rankings. Again, a lot of South Korean universities do very well.

It is good that QS are prepared to experiment with different indicators but the methodological innovations of these rankings do not seem to help very much.

Jawaharlal Nehru University has been returned to India. (see previous post)

Don't They Teach Geography Any More?

The QS Asian University Rankings are now out. I hope to comment in a while. For the time being. I've noticed that in the "International Students Review" (I'm not sure that it's a review but never mind), Jawaharlal Nehru University is listed as being in South Korea? I'm wondering how long it will remain there?

Asian University Rankings

QS will shortly release their Top 100 Asian Universities Rankings. It seems from the bits and pieces released so far that Australia, the Pacific and South West Asia are not included. There appear to be two innovations -- a trial run for the global rankings? -- namely counting student exchanges and including citations per paper as a measure of quality of research.

The Man with the Midas Touch

Those who are familiar with Malaysian gymnastics – admittedly not a large group -- will know who I am talking about.

There is a gymnastics coach in Malaysia who has achieved remarkable results with the women’s team of a very small state. For the last few years this state has won gold after gold at national competition. Hence the title bestowed by the Malaysian press. There does not seem to be anything special about the state – the men’s team has never done very much. Nor is there anything unusual about his training methods apart from their rigour and his intolerance for poor performance.

There must then be something about his selection methods. The state is so small that it does not have a gymnastics association and so this coach is free to select anyone he wants for training.

Recently, there was an opportunity to see just what these selection methods might be. The coach has now moved up to the national team and held a selection for young gymnasts, one of whom was my daughter, to train at the national sports centre.

The selection was quite revealing. The gymnasts were required to run, jump, do a bridge, do as many chin-ups as they could and a few simple exercises. Their height and weight were measured. There was no interest in their competition records, team spirit, motivation, leadership qualities or ability to respond to adversity.

At the end there was an interesting moment. The gymnasts were told to line up with their parents behind. There was much scurrying into position as people assumed they were being summoned for a group photograph, something without which no Malaysian event of any sort is complete. But after surveying the lineup, the coach said thank you and waved everyone away. What he was in fact doing was checking to see what the gymnasts would look like in a few years

So that was the secret of the man with the Midas touch. Assessment of basic physical skills and characteristics and reference to inherited traits. It was as though someone selected for elite universities by a simple test of general intelligence and a check on parental academic performance.

So here are two proposed experiments. Asian universities – and others – should scrap the proliferating complex of personality tests, language tests, co-curricular activities, interviews to test for leadership, politeness, sensitivity, appearance, interest and so on, profiles, course work and essays and just test for general cognitive ability.

The second experiment is that this coach and others should take heed of the global consensus and introduce personality tests, interviews and the whole paraphernalia of holistic assessment to choose future athletes.

I have a horrible feeling that the first will never happen but that one day the second will.