“Institutes are questioning the value and methods used by ranking companies, which can focus more on research output than other parameters.”
An interesting article on ranking systems – and why we should not engage: Sorbonne University, Columbia University, Utrecht University, Yale and Harvard, and several Indian institutes have opted out of major ranking systems such as the Times Higher Education (THE). Commercial rankings make up a billion dollar industry, but are thought to be unscientific and a poor means of measuring quality.
Where do I begin to agree with the withdrawals?
- why do we get ranked, with serious implications on our research by methods we did not choose, were not asked about, decided by for profit organizations?
- see an example of the system being rigged in the post here, where a mathematics department got ranked 7th in its 2nd year of existence
- “Goodhart’s law”, see post here, states such numeric metrics become useless as quality indicators when used as such, see
- trying to rank entire universities with a very diverse range of fields takes exorbitant effort, taking variations in parameters of achievements in different fields into account, or does a one-suits-all numeric approach which because of that is pointless
- research may become restricted via such rankings, when universities aim to rank high, by e.g. reducing areas which do not contribute to exactly the evaluation criteria