Indicators of global university rankings: the theoretical issues (original) (raw)
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Scholarly Assessment Reports, 2021
Describes a method to provide an independent, community-sourced set of best practice criteria with which to assess global university rankings and to identify the extent to which a sample of six rankings, Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), CWTS Leiden, QS World University Rankings (QS WUR), Times Higher Education World University Rankings (THE WUR), U-Multirank, and US News & World Report Best Global Universities, met those criteria. The criteria fell into four categories: good governance, transparency, measure what matters, and rigour. The relative strengths and weaknesses of each ranking were compared. Overall, the rankings assessed fell short of all criteria, with greatest strengths in the area of transparency and greatest weaknesses in the area of measuring what matters to the communities they were ranking. The ranking that most closely met the criteria was CWTS Leiden. Scoring poorly across all the criteria were the THE WUR and US News rankings. Suggestions for developing the ranker rating method are described.
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'Being a world class university' is the motto of the majority of the Universities. Ranking have become a popular way to compare higher education institutions performance and productivity. Getting good ranking in the world ranking and maintenance of the same is not an easier task. But the most critical problem is that the presence of unlimited ranking agencies. Both institutions, as well as the stakeholders were in contrast, which ranking should follow to have most realistic information? The ranking is not everything still, it transform some aspects of quality assessment to the whole world. This article critically evaluates the top universities ranking agencies criteria. The top ranked university of India can get the rank in between 200 to 250 in the world list. This article also focuses on the India's preparation for the world ranking and an attempt has been made to look into the solutions considering the management techniques.
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Recently, many universities have drawn attention to world university rankings, which reflect the international competition of universities and represent their relative statuses. This study does not radically contradict all types of global university rankings but calls for an examination of the effects of their indicators on the final ranking of universities. By using regression analysis, this study investigates the indicator contribution to the ranking of universities in world university ranking systems including the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), Times Higher Education ( THE ), and QS World University Rankings. Results showed that in the ARWU system, three indicators regarding faculty members who won Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals and papers published in Nature and Science and in the Science Citation Index and Social Science Citation Index journals predicted the ranking of universities. For the QS and THE systems, the more powerful contributors to the ranking of uni...
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TENDENCIES IN DEVELOPING UNIVERSITY RANKINGS AND THE WAYS OF IMPROVING THEM
Problem statement. Globalization of educational environment and educational services market necessitates the development of objective quality assessment tools of such services on the part of their direct consumers as well as on the part of the employers. One of the indirect, but the most common and most accessible to the public tools of education services quality evaluation in the system of higher education is university rankings.
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University rankings have gained growing attention from university administrations and faculty members, markets, governments, mass media and the public at large, affecting nearly all aspects directly or indirectly related to academia. This Theme Section includes 12 essays from 16 authors, coming from 9 countries (i.e. Singapore, the USA, the UK, Ireland, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Cyprus and Greece). These essays cover different methodological, socio-political, economical and ethical 'hot issues' emerging from the dominance of rankings in the higher education sector through the views and thoughts of different stakeholders (i.e. university administrators, people involved in performing the rankings, and scientists). We hope that this Theme Section and the questions it raises will further contribute to the recent debate and future of university rankings, whether they be global or regional, as well as help find the nexus between numbers (i.e. rankings) and knowledge (i.e. higher education institutions); to paraphrase Plato's quote 'a good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers'.
International Journal of Innovation and Applied Studies, 2014
Global university rankings have cemented the notion of a world university market arranged in a single "league table" for comparative purposes and have given a powerful impetus to intranational and international competitive pressures in the sector. The studies on evaluation of academic productivity and quality and web presence have led to development of new academic fields such as Bibliometrics, Scientometrics, Informetrics and Webometrics. During the last thirty years, as an outcome of these new emerging academic fields, several university ranking systems have been developed both at national and global level. Although these university ranking systems have attracted attention; they have been criticized due to a number of issues such as inappropriateness of indicators chosen, scoring procedure adopted, weighting, etc. In this study, a combined academic and web performance evaluation and global ranking system has been developed and implemented using data mining. The new global system which processes about more than 5,000 world universities is based on data from non-subjective, reliable and universally accepted online sources. The scoring procedure includes statistical analysis and data has been collected via a tool developed for this purpose to eliminate human errors.