Milestone passed

The previous post was the 1,000th.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Highlights from the Princeton Review

Here are the top universities in selected categories in the latest Best Colleges Ranking from Princeton Review. The rankings are based entirely on survey data and are obviously subjective and vulnerable to sampling error. Most conservative students: University of Dallas, Texas Most liberal students: Reed College, Oregon Best campus food: University of Massachusetts Amherst Happiest students: Vanderbilt University, Tennessee Party schools: Tulane University, Louisiana Don't inhale: US Coast Guard Academy, Connecticut Best college library: University of Chicago, Illinois Best-run college: University of Richmond, Virginia Most studious students: Harvey Mudd College, California Most religious students: Thomas Aquinas College, California Least religious students:  Reed College, Oregon Best athletic facilities: Auburn University, Alabama.
Read more

Will North Korea Engage with the Rankings?

Kim Jong-un has declared that Kim Il-sung University must become a world-class institution . No doubt there will be chuckles at Oxford,  Anglia Ruskin University, the University of Iceland and the Free University of Bozen - Bolzano but it could be surprisingly easy if being world class means getting a high place in the rankings. After all, there are now quite a few places appearing in the various global and regional tables that would have been just as surprising just a few years ago. First, I should mention that there already is a ranking in which Kim Il-sung University is listed: a ranking of international influence as measured by Google's ranking of search results where the institution is 254th. Here is my plan for North Korea to become world class in just a few years. 1. Offer adjunct professorships to 150 researchers and ask them to  put the university as a secondary affiliation. Maybe they can come and visit Pyongyang sometimes but that is not really necessary. In a litt...
Read more

Guest Post by Pablo Achard

This post is by Pablo Achard of the University of Geneva. It refers to  the Shanghai subject rankings. However, the problem of outliers in subject and regional rankings is one that affects all the well known rankings and will probably become more important over the next few years How a single article is worth 60 places We can’t repeat it enough: an indicator is bad when a small variation in the input is overly amplified in the output. This is the case when indicators are based on very few events. I recently came through this issue (again) with Shanghai’s subject ranking of universities. The universities of Geneva and Lausanne (Switzerland) share the same School of Pharmacy and a huge share of published articles in this discipline are signed under the name of both institutions. But in the “Pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences” ranking, one is ranked between the 101 st and 150 th position while the other is 40 th . Where does this difference come from? Comparing the scores obtained ...
Read more