Bibliography 1

The European Journal of Education has a special free issue on university rankings. See HERE.

Under-50 Universities: Comparing THE and QS

Times Higher Education has just released its list of new universities, those that are less than 50 years old.
The top ten are:
1.   Pohang University of Science and Technology (Postech)
2.   EPF Lausanne
3.   Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)
4.   Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
5.   Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
6.   Maastricht University
7.   University of California Irvine
8.   Universite Paris-Sud 11
9.   Universite Marie et Pierre Curie
10. Lancaster University

And here are the top ten from QS's top new universities:

1.   Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
2.   Nanyang Technological University
3.   KAIST
4.   City University of Hong Kong
5.   Pohang University of Science and Technology
6.   Maastricht
7.   University of California Irvine
8.   Hong Kong Polytechnic University
9.   Autonomous University of Barcelona
10. Antwerp University

In some respects the two lists are quite similar. KAIST is in 3rd place, Maastrict in 6th and Irvine in 7th in both lists.Both have two Korean institutions in the top five.

However, there are some noticeable differences, showing the effect of methodology and weighting. There are three Hong Kong universities in QS's top ten but only one in THE's, probably reflecting the greater weight given to internationalisation and reputation in the former. City University of Hong Kong is 4th in the QS rankings and 17th in THE's. Hong Kong Polytechnic University gets 8th and 30th place.

Meanwhile the two French universities in the THE top ten, helped by very substantial scores for citations, are not ranked at all by QS although they had more than enough points in the world rankings. This could be because there are different interpretations about when full university status was achieved.

Will Alexandria University Make a Comeback?

In 2010 the first edition of the new model Times Higher Education  World University Rankings -- powered by Thomson Reuters -- caused amusement and consternation by placing Alexandria University in fourth place for research impact and in the world's top 200 overall.

This extraordinary achievement was entirely the result of the writings of one man, Dr Mohamed El Naschie "of" several universities, one of which was Alexandria University. By citing himself and being cited by others for papers published in a field in which there normally few citations, especially in the first two years after publication, El Naschie pushed the university into a huge score for citation impact.

Anyone interested in the El Naschie story can consult the blog El Naschie Watch. An appraisal of his work's scientific merit can be found in the legal  judgement in 2012 of Mrs Justice Sharp.

In 2011 TR tweaked the citations indicator a bit and managed to get Alexandria's citations score down to 61.4, which was still massively disproportionate to its score for research and its overall score. Then in 2012 it disappeared from the top 400 altogether.

Still the university did not give in. Like an ageing boxer trying for ever more obscure titles, Alexandria showed up in 93rd place in the 2013 THE BRICS and Emerging Economies rankings with a still creditable 31.5 for citations. That score of course represented citations of El Naschie's papers in the years up to 2009 after which he stopped publishing in Web of Science journals. One would expect the score to dwindle further as the number of his countable papers diminished year by year.

It seemed that Alexandria was destined to fade away into the legions of the unranked universities of the world. After his month of wonders in September 2009 when he published eight papers in a single issue of Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, El Naschie published nothing in indexed journals in 2010, 2011 or 2012.

But in July 2013 El Naschie had a paper in the Russian journal Gravitation and Cosmology. Eleven out of 31 cited references were to his own works. That could be a useful boost for Alexandria. However, the paper so far remains uncited.

El Naschie gave Alexandria University as his affiliation and reprint address although the email address appears to be a relic of his days as editor of Chaos Solitons and Fractals.

Will there be more indexed papers from El Naschie? Will Alexandria return to the world rankings?

The Continued Oppression of Women at Oxford

As the advance of women through academia continues there are a few stubborn pockets of non-compliance. It appears that one is Oxford, where in some schools men are more likely to get first class degrees than women. This has excited much comment among educational experts who are generally unconcerned about the poor or declining performance of men in most subjects in most British universities.

Back in 1993 a study by McNabb, Pal and Sloane in Economica found that men were more likely than women to get first class degrees at English and Welsh universities. They were also more likely to get third class, pass or "other" degrees and less likely to get upper seconds but that did not seem to cause much concern.

A recent report by the Higher Education Funding Council for England has discovered that women have caught up with men as far as firsts are concerned while men are still behind with regard to upper seconds and continue to get more third class and other poor degrees.

But there is still work to do. There remain some subjects in some places that have defied global and national trends.

One of these is Oxford where a third of male students got firsts last year compared with a quarter of women. Men were ahead in 26 out of 38 subjects (and presumably behind or equal in 12 although nobody seems very bothered about that). The gap was particularly large in Chemistry, English  and History.

What is the reason for the relatively poor performance of Oxford women in English, Chemistry and History (the relatively poor performance of men in other fields obviously requires no explanation)? A female English student  says it has something to do with the confidence engendered by  "a certain type of all-male public [i.e. private] school". That assumes that it is students from all-male public schools and not state school nerds who are getting all those firsts.

Deborah Cameron, Professor of Language and Communication at Oxford University whose career has obviously failed to reach its full potential because of male bias, claims that it is because borderline first/upper second men are pushed by their tutors in a way that women are not. Is there any real evidence for this?

None of this is new. There was a similar report in 2013. Men were ahead in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, incubator of future politicians, and Modern Languages but behind in Jurisprudence and Classics.

There will no doubt be soul searching, reports, workshops and committees and in the end the imbalance will be rectified, probably by supplementing written exams with coursework and assignments and shifting the borders between first and upper seconds a bit.

I suspect though that it would be more helpful to read Julian Tan in the Huffington Post who writes that he got a first at Oxford by not travelling during spring breaks, saying no to nights out, revising instead of going to the college ball, not sleeping much, not spending much and worrying and complaining too much.

Tan notes that he was in the top four per cent for his subject (he said fourth percentile but that wouldn't get him a first anywhere) so he could probably have had a few trips or nights out before slipping into 2(i) territory. I suspect though that he may located the secret of the surviving pockets of male supremacy, which is the bizarre medical condition that causes some, mainly male, students or employees to find writing code, sitting in archives, reading about how to put out fires or fiddling around with SPSS files more interesting than social relationships, sharing interactive moments or exploring one's emotions.