The report says a UCD-TCD merger would give the merged college the critical mass and expertise needed to secure a place among the world’s best-ranked universities. At present, Ireland is not represented among the top 100 universities in the prestigious Times Higher Education World Reputation Ranking.
Harvard College’s disciplinary board is investigating nearly half of the 279 students who enrolled in Government 1310: “Introduction to Congress” last spring for allegedly plagiarizing answers or inappropriately collaborating on the class’ final take-home exam.
Dean of Undergraduate Education Jay M. Harris said the magnitude of the case was “unprecedented in anyone’s living memory.”
Harris declined to name the course, but several students familiar with the investigation confirmed that Professor Matthew B. Platt's spring government lecture course was the class in question.
The professor of the course brought the case to the Administrative Board in May after noticing similarities in 10 to 20 exams, Harris said. During the summer, the Ad Board conducted a review of all final exams submitted for the course and found about 125 of them to be suspicious.
English universities will be expected to enrol thousands more undergraduates from working-class families and poor-performing state schools in return for the right to charge up to £9,000 in tuition fees, it emerged.
Prof Ebdon, newly-appointed director of the Office for Fair Access, suggested that one poor student should eventually be admitted for each candidate enlisted from the wealthiest 20 per cent of households.
Currently, the ratio stands at around one-to-seven, he said.Speaking as he took up his role this week, Prof Ebdon said the country’s best universities were “not going to stay world class in a very competitive world unless they have access to the full pool of talent”
For the first time, MIT has been ranked as the world’s top university in the QS World University Rankings. The No. 1 ranking moves the Institute up two spots from its third-place ranking last year; two years ago, MIT was ranked fifth.
The full 2012-13 rankings — published by Quacquarelli Symonds, an organization specializing in education and study abroad — can be found at http://www.topuniversities.com/. QS rankings are based on research quality, graduate employment, teaching quality, and an assessment of the global diversity of faculty and students.
MIT was also ranked the world’s top university in 11 of 28 disciplines ranked by QS, including all five in the “engineering and technology” category: computer science, chemical engineering, civil engineering, electrical engineering and mechanical engineering.
QS also ranked the Institute as the world’s best university in chemistry, economics and econometrics, linguistics, materials science, mathematics, and physics and astronomy.
The Institute ranked among the top five institutions worldwide in another five QS disciplines: accounting and finance (2), biological sciences (2), statistics and operational research (3), environmental sciences (4) and communication and media studies (5).
Rounding out the top five universities in the QS ranking were the University of Cambridge, Harvard University, University College London and the University of Oxford.
"University rankings would have to be the worst consumer ratings in the retail market. In no other area are customers so badly served by consumer ratings as in the global student market," said Professor Bebbington. "The international rankings must change, or student consumers worldwide will eventually stop using them.
"Next to buying a house, choosing a university education is for most students, the largest financial commitment they will ever make. A degree costs more than a car, but if consumer advice for cars was this poor, there would be uproar.
"Students the world over use rankings for advice on which particular teaching program, at what campus to enrol in. Most don't realise that many of the rankings scarcely measure teaching or the campus experience at all. They mostly measure research outcomes." For this reason, said Professor Bebbington, half the universities in the US, including some very outstanding institutions, remain unranked.
He went on to discuss the inconsistency of university ranking results against the quality of the learning experience. According to Professor Bebbington, such a contradiction should come as no surprise: "Anyone who knows exactly what the rankings actually measure knows they have little bearing on the quality of the education."
Another problem was an increasing number of ranking systems, each producing different results. "With some, we have seen universities shift 40 places in a year, simply because the methodology has changed, when the universities have barely changed at all," he said. "It leaves students and parents hopelessly confused."
The Jiao Tong rankings in particular favour natural sciences and scarcely reflect other fields according to Professor Bebbington. "Moreover, they assume all universities have research missions. Those dedicated to serving their State or region through teaching, rather than competing in the international research arena, may be outstanding places to study, but at present are unranked.
"What is needed is a ranking that offers different lists for undergraduate teaching programs, international research-focussed programs, and regionally focussed programs. We need a ranking that measures all disciplines and is not so focussed on hard science."
As yet unpublished research by international student recruitment agency IDP will show university rankings remain one of the very top information sources for international students when choosing where to study.
If they are making such a major investment in their future, the overall reputation of the institution is paramount. The name on the degree certificate is a global passport to a lifelong career.
Broad composite rankings - even those that say nothing about teaching and learning - will always matter to students.
But that does not mean the rankers do not have to improve.
The Times Higher Education league table, due for publication on October 4, is the only ranking to take teaching seriously. We employ five indicators (worth 30 per cent) dedicated to offering real insight into the teaching environment, based on things such as a university's resources, staff-student ratio and undergraduate-postgraduate mix.
Some 2,600 foreign students affected by the London Metropolitan University (LMU) visa ban have been given until at least 1 December to find a new course.
The UK Border Agency says it will write to students after 1 October and "will ensure you have 60 days" to make a new student application or leave the UK.
On Thursday, the UKBA revoked LMU's licence to authorise non-EU visas. Ministers said it was failing to monitor student attendance.
At London Metropolitan University we believe that everyone has the right to an affordable quality education. Our fees for 2012/13 have been set at levels significantly lower than other Universities, and our courses recently received top marks from the UK's Quality Assurance Agency. We are committed to delivering affordable quality education, and are proud of the diversity & achievements of our students, alumni and staff.
Here at London Met we put our students at the centre of all we do.
London Met is a great place to study, located in the heart of one of the world's most exciting cities.
We stand out because we offer courses of quality, in a vibrant, socially diverse environment, which will help launch your career.
We are committed to transforming lives, meeting needs and building careers.
Since the start of the twenty-first century, university rankings have become
internationalized. Global rankings have a variety of uses, levels of popularity and
rationales and they are here to stay. An examination of the results of the current
global ranking reveals that well-reputed world-class universities are amongst the
top ranked ones. A major concern for university administrators in many parts of
the world is how to use the global rankings wisely in their mid-term and longterm
strategic planning for building their institutions into world-class
universities. Four major global rankings have been developed: the Academic
Ranking of World Universities, the World University Rankings, the
Webometrics Ranking of World Universities and the Performance Ranking of
Scientific Papers for World Universities. The main purpose of this paper is to
explore the most influential indicators in these global university rankings that
will affect the rank mobility of an institution. Based on an analysis of correlation
coefficients and K-means clustering, a model of strategic institutional planning
for building a world-class university is proposed.
A new report urging Canadian universities to nearly double international student enrolment by 2022 signals a fundamental policy change in Canada.
The report, released last week, recommends that Canada increase the number of foreign students from 240,000 in 2011 to 450,000 by 2022.
The government-appointed panel led by Amit Chakma, president and vice-chancellor of the University of Western Ontario, also laid out a blueprint for how the federal government ought to support universities in their recruitment efforts.
China has been wooing foreign universities and foreign students in a bid to internationalise its universities and as part of a ‘soft power’ policy to project itself internationally.
“China wants to be seen as a major player internationally in terms of education,” said Anthony Welch, a professor of international education at the University of Sydney.
“There is a clear national policy in China of ‘soft power’ using education. I would argue that is a good thing for all partners,” said Yang Rui, an assistant professor in Hong Kong University’s faculty of education.
Polish universities have introduced a free iPhone and iPad app to spread information internationally about opportunities in Polish higher education, and an Android version is promised soon.
The use of the latest technology will move the promotion of Polish higher education to a completely new level, according to a Polish Press Agency report quoting Dr Wojciech Marchwica of the Perspektywy Educational Foundation (Fundacja Edukacyjna Perspektywy), coordinator of the Study in Poland programme.
The universities are hoping to attract high-quality students from Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan.
A few years ago, Ukraine was declared by the Study in Poland coordinating committee to be a priority source country, as it is tied to Poland by history, culture and geographical proximity.
The effort has already brought measurable results: the number of students from Ukraine grew from 1,989 in 2005 to 6,321 in 2012, an increase of more than 300%. In 2009 Study in Poland opened its first foreign office in Kyiv, at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute.
1. Harvard UniversityThat corresponds decently to the top five American research universities, to be sure, but it has nothing to do with the top five U.S. philosophy departments, at least not in the 21st-century. But it should hardly be surprising that if you ask academics teaching in philosophy departments in Japan or Italy to rank the best philosophy departments, many of them will use general university reputation as a proxy. Indeed, every department that is pretty obviously "overrated" in philosophy in this list is at a top research university, and every department obviously underrated is not: so, e.g., Rutgers comes in at a mere 13th, Pittsburgh at 18th (behind Brown and Penn), and North Carolina at 20th.
2. University of California, Berkeley
3. Princeton University
4. Stanford University
5. Yale University
QS Intelligence Unit is pleased to invite you to attend this afternoon event featuring the global exclusive release of the full QS World University Rankings® 2012-2013 Tuesday 11th September 2012 in Trinity College Dublin. Be among 300 university delegates present for a focused ninety minute session and networking reception on the eve of the EAIE conference.
When Thomson Reuters announced at the end of June that a record 26 journals had been consigned to its naughty corner this year for "anomalous citation patterns", defenders of research ethics were quick to raise an eyebrow.
"Anomalous citation patterns" is a euphemism for excessive citation of other articles published in the same journal. It is generally assumed to be a ruse to boost a journal's impact factor, which is a measure of the average number of citations garnered by articles in the journal over the previous two years.
Impact factors are often used, controversially, as a proxy for journal quality and, even more contentiously, for the quality of individual papers published in the journal and even of the people who write them.
When Thomson Reuters discovers that anomalous citation has had a significant effect on a journal's impact factor, it bans the journal for two years from its annual Journal Citation Reports (JCR), which publishes up-to-date impact factors.
"Impact factor is hugely important for academics in choosing where to publish because [it is] often used to measure [their] research productivity," according to Liz Wager, former chair of the Committee on Publication Ethics.
"So a journal with a falsely inflated impact factor will get more submissions, which could lead to the true impact factor rising, so it's a positive spiral."
One trick employed by editors is to require submitting authors to include superfluous references to other papers in the same journal.
A large-scale survey by researchers at the University of Alabama in Huntsville's College of Business Administration published in the 3 February edition of Science found that such demands had been made of one in five authors in various social science and business fields.
At the University of Malaya’s centennial celebrations in June 2005, the then Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak threw the challenge to University of Malaya to raise its 89th position among the world’s top 100 universities in THES-QS (Times Higher Education Supplement-Quacquarelli Symonds) ranking in 2004 to 50 by the year 2020.
Instead of accepting Najib’s challenge with incremental improvement of its THES ranking, the premier university went into a free fall when in 2005 and 2006 it fell to 169th and 192nd ranking respectively, and in the following two years in 2007 and 2008, fell out of the 200 Top Universities ranking altogether.
In 2009, University of Malaya made a comeback to the 200 Top Universities Ranking when it was placed No. 180, but in 2010 it again fell out of the 200 Top Universities list when it dropped to 207th placing.
For the 2011 QS Top 200 Universities Ranking, University of Malaya returned to the Top 200 Universities Ranking, being placed at No. 167.
In the THES-QS World University Rankings 2009, University of Malaya leapfrogged 50 places from No. 230 placing in 2008 to No. 180 in 2009; while in the 2011 QS World University Ranking, University of Malaya leapt 40 places from No. 207 in 2010 to No. 167 in 2011.
The QS World University Rankings 2012 will be released in 20 days’ time. Can University of Malaya make another leapfrog as in 2009 and 2011 to seriously restore her place as one of the world’s top 100 universities by before 2015?
The government has announced that in addition to Najib’s challenge to University of Malaya in 2005 to be among the world’s Top 50 universities by 2020, the National Higher Education Strategic Plan called for at least three Malaysian universities to be ranked among the world’s top 100 universities.
Recently, the U.S. News World’s Best Universities Rankings included five local universities in its Top 100 Asian Universities, but this is not really something to celebrate about.
The U.S. News World’s Best Universities Ranking is actually based on the QS 2012 Top 300 Asian University Rankings released on May 30 this year, which commented that overall, although University of Malaya improved its ranking as compared to 2011 ranking, the majority of Malaysian universities dropped in their rankings this year as compared to 2011.There is a lot of detail missing here. UM"s fluctuating scores had nothing to do with failed or successful policies but resulted from errors, corrections of errors, or "clarification of data", changes in methodology and variations in the collecting and reporting of data .
It seems that one effect of the inflated number of responses was to raise the mean score so that universities with below average scores saw a dramatic fall in their adjusted scores. If there is a further increase in responses this year universities like UM may see a further reduction for this indicator."QS received a dramatic level of response from Latin America in 2011, these counts and all subsequent analysis have been adjusted by applying a weighting to responses from countries with a distinctly disproportionate level of response."
