Looks Like THE isn't Big in Japan Anymore

It has taken a long time but it seems that Japanese universities are getting a little irritated about the Times Higher Education (THE) World and Asian University Rankings.

I have commented on the THE Asian rankings here, here and here.

According to the Nikkei Asian Review,

  Research University 11, a consortium of Japan's top 11 universities, issued a statement earlier this month that the Times Higher Education ranking should not be used to determine national policy or as an achievement indicator.

Another umbrella group, the Research University Network of Japan, which includes universities and research institutions, has opposed the ranking every year Japanese universities have taken big tumbles.

and

So achieving a higher ranking does not necessarily correlate with providing better educations and research opportunities.

For some universities, there is another worry -- politics. The Japanese government in 2013 said it would aim to ensure that Japanese universities rank among the world's top 100 over the following decade. Now, Japanese universities are required to develop specific strategies to help the government reach this "revitalization" goal.

Another Important Ranking

Another ranking that should be looked at very carefully is the International Mathematical Olympiad, designed for pre-university students, the first of which was held in Romania in 1959. The competition includes problems in algebra, pre-calculus, complex geometry and functional equations.

Twenty years ago the Olympiad was dominated by ex-communist Eastern Europe. In 1996, first place was taken by Romania while Hungary was third and  Russia fourth. Now, East Asia and the Chinese diaspora are dominant: South Korea second, China third, Singapore fourth, Taiwan fifth, North Korea sixth, Hong Kong ninth, Japan tenth.

The USA is first this year, as it was in 2015, with an all-male team whose members have three South Asian and three Chinese surnames.

The rankings look pretty much like the PISA and TIMSS test scores. Combined with the recent coding competition and the Top500 supercomputing ranking, they suggest the intellectual and economic leaders of this century will be in East Asia and Eastern Europe including Russia.

The USA and the UK might do fairly well if they can introduce and maintain sensible immigration and educational selection policies.

The American success, unfortunately, is not good enough for the conventional education media. The team is not diverse enough: no women, no historically underrepresented minorities. So far nobody has protested about the absence of transgender or openly gay students but perhaps their time will eventually come.

Education Week reports that:

"According to Mark Saul, the director of competitions for the Mathematical Association of America, not a single African-American or Hispanic student—and only a handful of girls—has ever made it to the Math Olympiad team in its 50 years of existence."

To overcome this problem, participants in the events leading up to the Olympiad have competitions that test creativity and collaboration and are judged subjectively.   

"In the past few years, MathCounts added two new middle school programs to try to diversify its participant pool—National Math Club and the Math Video Challenge.

"Schools or teachers who sign up for the National Math Club receive a kit full of activities and resources, but there's no special teacher training and no competition attached.

The Math Video Challenge is a competition, but a collaborative one. Teams of four students make a video illustrating a math problem and its real-world application.

After the high-pressure Countdown round at this year's national MathCounts competition, in which the top 12 students went head to head solving complex problems in rapid fire, the finalists for the Math Video Challenge took the stage to show their videos. The demographics of that group looked quite different from those in the competition round—of the 16 video finalists, 13 were girls and eight were African-American students. The video challenge does not put individual students on the hot seat—so it's less intimidating by design. It also adds the element of artistic creativity to attract a new pool of students who may not see themselves as "math people."

An 8th grade team from the Ron Clark Academy, an independent middle school in Atlanta that serves low-income students, was among the finalists. The students illustrated a complicated multistep problem entirely through rap. None had ever been involved in a math competition before."

In other words, the competitions will be less and less about mathematics and more and more about making rap videos and the like. No doubt Russia, China and Korea will be flocking to the US to see how its done. Much the same thing has been happening with national competitive debating.

Here are this year's results and those for 2015 and 1996.

Rank 2016	Team	Rank 2015	Rank 1996
1	USA	1	2
2	South Korea	3	8
3	China	2	6
4	Singapore	10	25
5	Taiwan	18	20
6	North Korea	4	--
7=	Russia	8	4
7=	UK	22	5
9	Hong Kong	28	27
10	Japan	22	11
11	Vietnam	5	7
12=	Canada	9	16
12=	Thailand	12	47
14	Hungary	20	3
15=	Brazil	22	52
15=	Italy	29	25
17	Philippines	36	74
18	Bulgaria	29	11
19	Germany	27	10
20=	Romania	13	1
20=	Indonesia	29	70
22	Israel	40	15
23	Mexico	19	53
24	Iran	7	9
25=	Australia	6	23
25=	France	14	32
25=	Peru	16	--
28	Kazakhstan	28	25
29	Turkey	20	19
30=	Armenia	26	34
30=	Croatia	15	34
30=	Ukraine	11	18
33	Mongolia	35	44
34	India	34	37
35=	Bangladesh	33	--
35=	Belarus	39	21
37=	Czech Republic	45	28
37=	Sweden	60	40
39	Macau	35	48
40	Serbia	40	29
41	Saudi Arabia	41	--
42	Poland	17	13
43	Switzerland	45	62
44	Netherlands	43	59
45	Bosnia - Herzogovina	43	57
46	Austria	60	42
47	Portugal	52	13
48	Syria	54	--
49	Spain	72	48
50=	Lithuania	65	32
50=	Greece	51	22
52	Belgium	56	31
53	New Zealand	49	--
54	Azerbaijan	48	58
55	Slovakia	33	17
56	Malaysia	57	72
57	Argentina	52	29
58	South Africa	55	43
59=	Costa Rica	67	--
59=	Georgia	42	30
61	Estonia	70	55
62	Tajikistan	64	--
63=	Moldova	38	41
63=	Slovenia	73	44
63=	Cyprus	63	69
66=	Sri Lanka	70	53
66=	Colombia	49	46
68	El Salvador	95	--
69=	Albania	77	67
69=	Turkmenistan	58	72
71=	Finland	82	39
71=	Paraguay	67	--
73	Macedonia	74	46
74	Latvia	79	33
75	Ireland	77	61
76	Tunisia	75	--
77=	Kosovo	86	--
77=	Uzbekistan	58	--
79	Morocco	80	65
80	Nicaragua	82	--
81	Denmark	69	48
82	Algeria	62	--
83	Ecuador	80	--
84=	Kyrgyzstan	92	67
84=	Norway	65	37
86	Venezuela	96	--
87	Puerto Rico	90	--
88=	Montenegro	89
88=	Nigeria	88
90	Iceland	75	56
91=	Chile	97	71
91=	Pakistan	85	--
93	Uruguay	93	--
94	Trinidad & Tobago	82	60
95	Luxemburg	97	--
96=	Cambodia	86	--
96=	Myanmar	--	--
98	Uganda	100	--
99	Kenya	--	--
100=	Honduras	--	--
100=	Madagascar	--	--
102	Jamaica	102	--
103	Botswana	103	--
104=	Egypt
104=	Ghana	101	--
106	Tanzania	106	--
107=	Iraq	--	--
107=	Liechtenstein	90	--
109	Laos	--	--