Trinity College Dublin: Waiting for Clarification

Yesterday I published a post about Trinity College Dublin that referred to a report in the London Sunday Times about TCD encouraging its graduates to respond to questionnaires  from THE.

Now I have seen a report in Inside Higher Education that says that TCD has been encouraging people to sign up for the QS academic survey sign up facility and to vote for the college.

I have therefore deleted the post until it is clear whether TCD has been sending messages about about the QS or the THE surveys or both and whether it has violated the guidelines of either or both.

From Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"What we are seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking "clerks" and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think... and 5) who to vote for.

With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30y of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, microeconomic papers wrong 40% of the time, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating only 1/5th of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers with a better track record than these policymaking goons."

And, one might add, the publishers of sophisticated and prestigious rankings who would have us believe that a university can be world-class one year and at the bottom of the table the next.

Trinity College Dublin Gets Upset About Rankings

Trinity College Dublin has done remarkably well in global university rankings over the last decade. Since 2004 it has steadily risen from the 201-300 band to the 151-200 band in the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU). Its score for publications went from 27.1 in 2004 to 31 in 2015 (Harvard is 100) and for productivity per capita (scores for Nobel and Fields awards, papers in Nature and Science, highly cited researchers and publications divided by number of faculty) it rose from 13.9 to 19 (Caltech is 100).

The Shanghai rankings measure only research. Nonetheless, this is genuine progress even if slow and boring: at this rate Trinity will catch up with Harvard for publications in another 170 years or so.

So why is Trinity not celebrating this excellent achievement? Instead it is getting very excited about its poor and declining performance in the QS and THE world rankings.

It is a serious mistake to be concerned about falling in these rankings. Last year QS and THE made significant methodological changes so it is meaningless to make year on year comparisons.

Even if QS and THE make no further changes, these rankings are likely to be unacceptably volatile. Both rely heavily on reputation surveys for which scores tend to be very low once you get outside the top fifty or so and consequently are susceptible to short term fluctuations, although QS does damp down short term changes by recycling unchanged survey responses. THE has three income based indicators, institutional income, research income and income from industry and commerce so it is exposed to fluctuations resulting from exchange rate changes. If THE were serious about producing valid and reliable rankings they would use three or five year averages for the income indicators.


And so, as you might have guessed, Trinity is developing a rankings strategy

"The Rankings Steering Group, set up as part of the strategy, is chaired by the Provost, Patrick Prendergast, and has identified the QS World University Rankings and the Times Higher Education rankings as a priority. The strategy will focus on areas such as outputs, citations, funding levels, staff composition and reputation."

Plagiarism Data from Russia

The Russian website Dissernet has published information about about plagiarism in Russian universities. The worst offender, according to the Moscow Times, is the Financial University followed by the St Petersburg State University of Economics and the Plekhanov Economic University.

It seems that plagiarism is a big problem in Russian universities although it could be that some Russians are more serious about academic fraud than other countries.