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

The View from Leiden

Image
Ranking experts are constantly warning about the grim fate that awaits the universities of the West if they are not provided with all the money that they want and given complete freedom to hire staff and recruit students from anywhere that they want. If this does not happen they will be swamped by those famously international Asian universities dripping with funds from indulgent patrons. The threat, if we are to believe the prominent rankers of Times Higher Education (THE), QS and Shanghai Ranking Consultancy, is always looming but somehow never quite arrives. The best Asian performer in the THE world rankings  is the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 24th place followed by Peking University in 29th. The QS World University Rankings have NUS 12th, Nanyang Technological University 13th and Tsinghua University 24th.  The Academic Ranking of World Universities published in Shanghai puts the University of Tokyo in 20th place and Peking University in 71st. These ranking...
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