The link between rankings and standardised testing

The big hole in current international university rankings is the absence of anything that effectively measures the quality of graduates. Some rankings use staff student ratio or income as a proxy for the provision of resources, on the assumption that the more money that is spent or the more teachers deployed then the better the quality of teaching. QS has an employer survey that asks about the universities from where employers like to recruit but that has many problems.

There is a lot of of evidence that university graduates are valued to a large extent because they are seen as intelligent, conscientious and, depending on place and field, open-minded or conformist. A metric that correlates with these attributes would be helpful in assessing and comparing universities. 

A recent article in The Conversation by Jonathon Wai suggests that the US News America's Best Colleges rankings are highly regarded partly because they measure the academic ability of admitted students, which correlates very highly with that of graduates.

The popularity of these rankings is based on their capturing the average ability of students as measured by the SAT or ACT. Wai reports from a paper that he wrote in collaboration with Matt Brown and Christopher Chabris in the Journal of Intelligence that finds that there is a large correlation between the average SAT or ACT scores of students and overall scores in America's Best Colleges, .982 for national universities and .890 for liberal arts colleges. 

The correlation with the THE/WSJ US college rankings is less but still very substantial, .787, and also for the THE World University Rankings, .659.

It seems that employers and professional schools expect universities to certify the intelligence of their graduates. The value of standardised tests such as ACT, SAT, GRE, LSAT, GMAT, which correlate highly with one another, is that  they are a fairly robust proxy for general intelligence or general mental ability. Rankings could be valuable if they provideda clue to the ability of graduates .

It is, however, a shame that the authors should support their argument by referring only to one global ranking, the THE world rankings. There are now quite a few international rankings that are as good as or better than the THE tables.

I have therefore calculated the correlations between the average SAT/ACT scores of 30 colleges and universities in the USA and their scores in various global rankings. 

The source for student scores is a supplement to the article by Wai at al, from which I have taken the top 30 ranked by SAT/ACT. I have used those rankings listed in the IREG inventory that provide numerical scores and and not just ranks. The GreenMetric was not used since only one US school out of these thirty, Washington University in St Louis, took part in that ranking. I used two indicators from Leiden Ranking, which does not give a composite score, total publications and the percentage of papers in the top 1% of journals.

It is interesting that there are many liberal arts colleges in the US that are not included in the international rankings. Prospective undergraduates looking for a college in the USA would do well to look beyond the global rankings. Harvey Mudd College, for example, is highly selective and its graduates much sought after but it does not appear in any of the rankings below.

The results are interesting. The indicator that correlates most significantly with student ability is Leiden Ranking's percentage of papers in the top 1% of journals. Next is CWUR, which does explicitly claim to measure graduate quality. The US News world rankings and the Shanghai rankings, which only include research indicators, also do well.

We are looking at just 30 US institutions here. There might be different results if we looked at other countries or a broader range of US schools.

So, it seems that if you want to look at the ability of students or graduates, an international ranking based on research is as good as or better than one that tries to measure teaching excellence with the blunt instruments currently available.

	Ranking	Address	correlation	significance	N
1	Leiden Ranking: papers in top 10% of journals	Netherlands	.65	.001*	22
2	Center for World University Ranking	UAE	.59	.003*	22
3	US News Best Global Universities	USA	.58	.004*	22
4	Shanghai ARWU	China	.57	.004*	24
5	Round University Rankings	Russia	.55	.008*	22
6	THE World University Rankings	UK	.51	.014*	22
7	QS World university Rankings	UK	.49	.025*	21
8	University Ranking by Academic Performance	Turkey	.48	.015*	25
9	Nature Index Fractional Count	USA	.45	.039*	21
10	National Taiwan University	Taiwan	.32	.147	22
11	Leiden: total Publications	Netherlands	.21	.342	22

*significant at 0.05 level 

Ulster University: no need to back down

Ulster University seems to have retracted the claim on its website that it is in the top 3% of universities in the world. Elsewhere it has apparently claimed to be in the top 2%.

According to the Belfast Telegraph

"Ulster University stated that it 'is in the top 3% of universities in the world' when it came 501-600th in the 1,103 Times Higher Education World University Rankings in 2018, putting them in the mid-tier of those rankings," a Which? spokesperson said.

"Further, in a website document "Ulster's 50 Facts Worth Knowing" Ulster University included the claim 'Top 2% of universities in the world (QS World Rankings)'."

The spokesman continued: "Which? University is particularly concerned about these comparative claims, given it is less than one year since the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) issued its comprehensive advice in November 2017 to universities about such claims and its rulings which upheld complaints about comparative claims made in university advertising.

"Where universities are making comparative claims about their relative performance, these should be verifiable and provided with sufficient qualifying information to ensure that prospective students are not misled."

It is unfortunate that Which? should use the THE World University Rankings as the only arbiter of excellence. There are now at least 17 global rankings plus a variety of specialist and niche international rankings. Some of these are just as comprehensive, valid or informative as the THE rankings, if not more so. The THE world rankings are also known (to some people anyway) for their whimsical assessment of the research impact of world universities. This year THE has included Babol Noshirvani University of Technology, the University of Reykjavik, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, Anglia Ruskin University, the University of Dessarollo and the University of Canberra as leaders of the global research scene.

Which? has a point. The university is thinking of the 28,077 universities listed in the Webometrics rankings. So if it were in the top 600 of the THE rankings, then it would be in the top 2.45% of world universities.

There is a fallacy here. Many universities that could do better than Ulster do not bother to submit data to THE. If they did they might well forge ahead.

But I see nothing wrong with the university noting that it is ranked 689th in the current Webometrics ranking, which includes web data and a measure of research output, out of 28,077 for which data is available and therefore is in the top 2.45% of the Webometrics ranking.

Ulster is also 777th for the Webometrics research excellence indicator, the number of papers in the top 10% most cited, which would put it in the top 2.77% of universities in the world.

A claim to be in the top 3% of universities would be legitimate providing the ranking and indicator is stated.

Here we go again: the THE citations indicator

The latest THE world  rankings have just been announced. For most of the indicators there are few surprises. There are more universities from Japan in the rankings. Oxford is first, followed by Cambridge. The USA contributes the largest number of top universities. China rises steadily. India is as usual is a disappointment. 

But, as in previous years, the most interesting thing is the citations indicator, which is supposed to measure research influence. Once again this has produced some very interesting results. 

Here are some of the universities in the top 100. 

Babol Noshirvani University of Technology: the most influential university in the world for research
Brighton and Sussex Medical School: most influential in Europe
Brandeis University: most influential in the USA
Reykjavik University
St George's, University of London: fallen a bit, probably because of Brexit
King Abdulaziz University: top university for research influence in the Middle East and Asia 
Anglia Ruskin University
Jordan University of Science and Technology
Vita-Salute San Raffaele University
Ulsan National Institute for Science and Technology: top in Asia ex Middle East
University of Canberra: best in Australia
University of Dessarollo: best in Latin America
McMaster University: best in Canada
Universite de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines: best in France
Teikyo University: best in Japan

There are signs that THE are considering reforming this indicator. If that does happen, the rankings will be more valid but much less entertaining.

Rankings and Higher Education Policy

Two examples of how the need to perform well in the rankings is shaping national research and higher education policy.

From the Irish Examiner

"Ireland must apply for membership of the world-renowned European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) in order to combat the effect of Brexit and boost university rankings.

That is according to Cork senator Colm Burke as the campaign to join Cern gains momentum, after Ireland recently became a member of the European Space Observatory."

From Times Higher Education

"France’s programme of university mergers is paying off, improving the research performance and international visibility of its top providers, according to the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2019.

Paris Sciences et Lettres – PSL Research University Paris, a 2010 merger of numerous institutions, climbed 31 places to 41st this year, becoming the first French university to feature in the top 50 best universities since 2011. PSL made its debut in the global table last year.

Its teaching and research scores improved, driven by increased global visibility and votes in the academic teaching and research reputation surveys.

Meanwhile, Sorbonne University, which was founded in January this year following the merger of Pierre and Marie Curie University and Paris-Sorbonne University, has joined the list at 73rd place – making it the highest-ranked newcomer in the table."

https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/business/cern-membership-vital-for-irish-universities-872312.html

Philosophy Department Will Ignore GRE Scores

The philosophy department at the University of Pennsylvania has taken a step away from fairness and objectivity in university admissions. It will no longer look at the GRE scores of applicants to its graduate programme. 

The department is good but not great. It is ranked 27th in the Leiter Report rankings and in the 101-150 band in the QS world subject rankings.

So how will students be selected without GRE scores? It seems it will be by letters of recommendation, undergraduate GPA, writing samples, admission statements.

Letters of recommendation have very little validity. The value of undergraduate grades has eroded in recent years and very likely will continue to do so. Admission essays and diversity statements  say little about academic ability and a lot about political conformism.

The reasons for the move are not convincing. Paying for the GRE is supposed to be a burden on low income students. But the cost is much less than Penn's exorbitant tuition fees. It is also claimed that the GRE and other standardised tests do not predict performance in graduate school. In fact they are a reasonably good predictor of academic success although they should not be used by themselves. 

Then there is the claim that the GRE "sometimes" underpredicts the performance of minorities and women. No doubt it sometimes does but then presumably sometimes it does not. Unless there is evidence that the underprediction is significant and that it is greater than that of other indicators this claim is meaningless.

What will be the result of this? The department will be able to admit students who "do not test well" but who can get good grades, something that is becoming less difficult at US colleges, or  persuade letter writers at reputable schools that they will do well.

It is likely that more departments across the US will follow Penn's lead. American graduate programmes will slowly become less rigorous and less able to compete with the rising universities of Asia.

Ranking Global Rankings: Information

Another indicator for ranking global rankings might be the amount of information that they contain. Here are 17 global rankings in the IREG Inventory ranked according to the number of indicators or groups of indicators for which scores or ranks are given. The median and the mode are both six.

The number for U-Multirank is perhaps misleading since data is not provided for all universities. 

 Number of indicators or indicator groups with scores or ranks

Rank	Ranking	Address of publisher	Number of indicators
1	U-Multirank	Germany	112
2	RUR Round University Rankings	Russia	20
3	CWTS Leiden Ranking	Netherlands	19
4	US News Best Global Universities	USA	13
5	NTU Ranking	Taiwan	8
6	CWUR University Rankings	UAE	7
7=	QS World University Rankings	UK	6
7=	Shanghai Ranking ARWU	China	6
7=	UI GreenMetric Ranking	Indonesia	6
7=	URAP University Ranking by Academic Performance	Turkey	6
11	THE World University Rankings	UK	5
12	Ranking Web of Universities (Webometrics)	Spain	4
13	SCImago Institutions Ranking	Spain	3
14	Nature Index	UK	2
15=	Emerging/Trendence Global University Employability	France	1
15=	Reuters Top 100 Innovative Universities	USA	1
15=	uniRank University Ranking	Australia	1

Ranking Global Rankings: Inclusion

The number of international global universities continues to grow and it is becoming harder to keep track of them. Earlier this year IREG published an inventory of international rankings that included 17 global rankings. Here are those rankings in order of the number of institutions that they rank in the most recent edition.

Webometrics is the clear winner, followed by uniRank and SCImago. There are, of course, other indicators to think about and some of these will be covered later.

Number of Institutions ranked

Rank	Ranking	Address of publisher	Number ranked
1	Ranking Web of Universities (Webometrics)	Spain	28,077
2	uniRank University Ranking	Australia	13,146
3	SCImago Institutions Ranking	Spain	5,637
4	URAP University Ranking by Academic Performance	Turkey	2,500
5	U-Multirank	Germany	1,500
6	US News Best Global Universities	USA	1,250
7	THE World University Rankings	UK	1,000+
8=	Shanghai Ranking ARWU	China	1,000
8=	CWUR University Rankings	UAE	1,000
10	QS World University Rankings	UK	916
11	CWTS Leiden Ranking	Netherlands	903
12	NTU Ranking	Taiwan	800
13	RUR Round University Rankings	Russia	783
14	UI GreenMetric Ranking	Indonesia	619
15	Nature Index	UK	500
16	Emerging/Trendence Global University Employability	France	150
17	Reuters Top 100 Innovative Universities	USA	100

Ranking US Rankings

Forbes Magazine has an article by Willard Dix that ranks US  ranking sites. The ranking is informal without specifying indicators but the author does give us an idea of what he thinks a good ranking should do.

Here are the top five of thirteen:
1.  US News: America's Best Colleges
2.  Money magazine: Best Colleges Ranking
3.  Forbes: America's Top Colleges
4.  Kiplinger's Best College Values
5.  Washington Monthly: College Guide and Rankings.

Reading through the comments it is possible to get an idea of the criteria of a good ranking. Rankings should contain a lot of information, they should be comprehensive and include a large number of institutions, they should provide data that helps prospective students and stakeholders, they should be published for several years, if they use surveys they should have a lot of respondents, they should have face validity (a list with a "revolutionary algorithm" that puts non-Ivy places at the top is in 13th place). 

Why is Australia doing well in the Shanghai rankings?

I am feeling a bit embarrassed. In a recent post I wrote about the Shanghai Rankings (ARWU) being a bit boring (which is good) because university ranks usually do not change very much. But then I noticed that a couple of Australian universities did very well in the latest rankings. One of them, the Australian National University (ANU), has risen a spectacular (for ARWU) 31 places over last year. The Financial Review says that "[u]niversity scientific research has boosted the position of two Australian universities in a global ranking of higher education providers." 

The ranking is ARWU and the rise in the ranking is linked to the economic contribution of Australian universities, especially those in the Group of Eight.

So how well did Australian universities do? The top performer, as in previous years, is the University of Melbourne, which went up a spot to 38th place. Two other universities went up a lot in a very un-Shanghainese way, ANU, already mentioned, from 69th to 38th place and the University of Sydney from  to 83rd to  68th

The University of Queensland was unchanged in 55th place while Monash fell from 78th to 91st  and the University of Western Australia from 91st to 93rd. 

How did ANU and Sydney do it? The ANU scores for Nobel and Fields awards were unchanged. Publications were up a bit  and papers in Nature and Science down a bit.  

What made the difference was the score for highly cited researchers, derived from lists kept by Clarivate Analytics, which rose from 15.4 to 23.5, a difference of 8.1 or, after weighting, 1.62 points of the overall score. The difference in total scores between 2017 and 2018 was 1.9 so those highly cited researchers made up most of the difference.

In 2016 ANU had two researchers in the list, which was used for the 2017 rankings. One was also on the 2017 list, used in 2018. In 2017 there were six ANU  highly cited researchers, one from the previous year and one who had moved from MIT. The other four were long serving ANU researchers.

Let's be clear. ANU has not been handing out unusual contracts or poaching from other institutions. It has grown its own researchers and should be congratulated.

But using an indicator where a single researcher can lift a top 100 university seven or eight places is an invitation to perverse consequences. ARWU should consider whether it is time to explore other measures of research impact.

The improved scores for the University of Sydney resulted from an increase between 2016 and 2017 in the number of articles published in the Science Citation Index Expanded and the Social Science Citation Index.

Who Cares About University rankings?

A paper by Ludo Waltman and Nees Jan van Eck asks what users of the Leiden Ranking are interested in. There's some interesting stuff but for now I just want to look at where the users come from.

The top ten countries where visitors originate are:

1.  USA
2.  Australia
3.  Netherlands
4.  UK
5.  Turkey
6.  Iran
7.  South Korea
8.  France
9.  Germany
10. Denmark.

The authors consider the number of visitors from Australia, Turkey, Iran and South Korea to be "quite remarkable."

Let's look at other signs of interest in rankings. Here are the top countries for respondents to the 2018 QS academic survey:

1.  USA
2.  UK
3.  Malaysia
4= Australia
4= South Korea
4= Russia
7= Italy
7= Japan
9= Brazil
9= Canada

And here are the top ten countries for visitors to this blog:

1. USA
2. UK
3. Russia
4. France
5. Germany
6. Ukraine
7. Canada
8. Malaysia
9. Australia
10. Singapore.

The three countries on all three lists are UK, USA and Australia. The countries on two lists are South Korea, Russia, Malaysia, France, Germany and Canada.










https://www.cwts.nl/blog?article=n-r2s2a4&title=what-are-users-of-the-cwts-leiden-ranking-interested-in

http://rankingwatch.blogspot.com/2018/06/responses-to-qs.html

Will THE do something about the citations indicator?

International university rankings can be a bit boring sometimes. It is difficult to get excited about the Shanghai rankings, especially at the upper end: Chicago down two places, Peking up one. There was a bit of excitement in 2014 when there was a switch to a new list of highly cited researchers and some universities went up and down a few places, or even a few dozen, but that seems over with now.

The Times Higher Education (THE) world rankings are always fun to read, especially the citations indicator, which since 2010 has proclaimed a succession of unlikely places as having an outsize influence on the world of research: Alexandria University, Hong Kong Baptist University, Bilkent University, Royal Holloway University of London, National Research University MEPhi Moscow, Tokyo Metropolitan University, Federico Santa Maria Technical University Chile, St George's University of London, Anglia Ruskin University Cambridge, Babol Noshirvani University University of Technology Iran.

I wonder if the good and the great of the academic world ever feel uncomfortable about going to those prestigious THE summits while places like the above are deemed to be the equal for research impact or the superior of Chicago or Melbourne or Tsinghua. Do they even look at the indicator scores?

These remarkable results are not because of deliberate cheating but of THE's methodology. First, research documents are divided into 300 plus fields, five types of documents, and five years of publication, and then the world average number of citations (mean) is calculated for each type of publication in each field and in each year. Altogether there are 8000 "cells" with which the average of each university in the THE rankings is compared .

This means that if a university manages to get a few publications in a field where citations are typically low it could easily get a very high citations score. 

Added to this is a "regional modification" where the final citation impact score is divided by the square root of the score of the country in which the country is located. This results in most universities receiving an increased score which is very small for those in productive countries and very high for those in countries that generate few citations. The modification is now applied to half of the citations indicator score.

Then we have the problems of those famous kilo-author mega-cited papers. These are papers with dozens, scores, or hundreds of participating institutions and similar numbers of authors and citations. Until 2015 THE treated every author as as though they were the sole author of a paper, including those with thousands of authors. Then in 2015 they stopped counting papers with over a thousand authors and in 2016 they introduced a modified fractional counting of citations for papers with over thousand authors. Citations were distributed proportionally among the authors with a minimum allotment of five per cent.

There are problems with all of these procedures. Treating every  authors as as the sole author meant that a few places can get massive citation counts from taking part in one or two projects such as the CERN project or the global burden of disease study . On the other hand excluding mega papers is also not helpful since it omits some of the most significant current research.

The simplest solution would be fractional counting all around, just dividing the number of citations of all papers by the numbers of contributors or contributing institutions. This is the default option of Leiden Ranking and there seems no compelling reason why THE could not so.

There are some other issues that should be dealt with. One is the question of self-citation. This is probably not a widespread issue but it has caused problems on a couple of occasions.

Something else that THE might want to think about is the effect of the rise of in the number of authors with multiple affiliations. So far only one university has recruited large numbers of adjunct staff whose main function seems to be  listing the university as a secondary affiliation at the top of published papers but there could be more in the future. 

Of course, none of this would matter very much if the citations indicator were given a reasonable weighting of, say, five or ten percent but it has more weight than any other indicator -- the next is the research reputation survey with 18 %. A single mega-paper or even a few strategically placed citations in a low cited field can have a huge impact on a university's overallscore.

There are signs that THE is getting embarrassed at the bizarre effects of this indicator. Last year Phil Baty, THE's ranking editor,  spoke about its quirky results. 

Recently, Duncan Ross, data director at THE, has written about the possibility of of a methodological change. He notes that currently the  benchmark world score for the 8000 plus cells  is determined by the mean. He speculates about using the median instead. The problem with this is that a majority of papers are never cited so the median for many of the cells is going to be zero. So he proposes, based on an analysis from the recent THE Latin American rankings, that the 75th percentile be used. 

Ross suggests that this would make the THE rankings more stable, especially the Latin American rankings where the threshold number of articles is quite low. 

It would also allow the inclusion of more universities that currently fall below the threshold. This, I suspect, is something that is likely to appeal to the THE management.

It is very good that THE appears willing to think about reforming the citations indicator. But a bit of tweaking will not be enough.