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University The University of Nottingham - Malaysia Campus v2, [UK University of The Year]

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bgeh
post Apr 19 2009, 11:02 PM

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QUOTE(thechetticompany @ Apr 19 2009, 09:32 PM)
Don't joke with me with THES Rankings ok?
It's regarded as the most biased UK ranking around which heavily promotes UK universities as well as Commonwealth nations such as Australia, NZ and Malaysia.

Perhaps you're right, it might be biased

QUOTE
Now could you all tell me why isn't Webometrics not accurate about Malaysian universities?
USM which is the only APEX university is top up there with UTM and UM taking 2nd and 3rd places.

I didn't know the APEX designation means that the university is the best in the country, when the funding for the APEX university hasn't even had the time to filter down to research projects or the students yet (and yes, this is why I don't understand people moaning about our APEX university not making it into the top 200 of THES, when the cash hasn't even had the time to make its rounds yet, these things take time, and we'll see the results (positive or negative) in a few years, but certainly not now)

QUOTE
They have even single out Oxbridge from their top 10 list because there are universities in the US who won Nobel Prizes 2-3X more than what Oxbridge has accomplished.

Wikipedia: Academically, Cambridge is consistently ranked in the world's top 5 universities.[6][7] It has produced 83 Nobel Laureates to date, more than any other university in the world according to some counts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Cambridge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_laureat...ity_affiliation

Only Columbia would beat Cambridge (88 vs. 83) using the same metric. Nothing close to 2x - 3x as you've claimed

This post has been edited by bgeh: Apr 19 2009, 11:04 PM
bgeh
post Apr 19 2009, 11:44 PM

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QUOTE(thechetticompany @ Apr 19 2009, 11:35 PM)
Source:

The latest criticism of the QS-THE league tables came from Andrew Oswald, Professor of Economics at University of Warwick:[12]

    "Such claims do us a disservice. The organisations who promote such ideas should be unhappy themselves, and so should any supine UK universities who endorse results they view as untruthful. Using these league table results on your websites, universities, if in private you deride the quality of the findings, is unprincipled and will ultimately be destructive of yourselves, because if you are not in the truth business what business are you in, exactly? Worse, this kind of material incorrectly reassures the UK government that our universities are international powerhouses. Let us instead, a bit more coolly, do what people in universities are paid to do. Let us use reliable data to try to discern the truth. In the last 20 years, Oxford has won no Nobel Prizes. Cambridge has done only slightly better. Stanford University in the United States, purportedly number 19 in the world, garnered three times as many Nobel Prizes over the past two decades as the universities of Oxford and Cambridge did combined. "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THES_-_QS_Wor...kings#Criticism
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Then perhaps you should've provided the context in which you made your statement wink.gif

But really, if the THES rankings are so biased, what makes the Webometrics rankings so much better, when they have no explicit aim to try to measure academic performance directly, but indirectly instead through the internet, which doesn't always have a strong correlation to academic prowess, no?
bgeh
post Apr 20 2009, 12:08 AM

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QUOTE(thechetticompany @ Apr 19 2009, 11:54 PM)
Do not underestimate the power of the internet. Most of the journals and work published by universities are made on the net. Webopedia believes that by measuring how much formal traffic and activity of a university, they can determine roughly how good the university is. By referring to the internet as a main source, they are not only referring to websites or student activities but library databases, discoveries, news and achievements are taken into account.

As for THES, if you read their method peer evaluation makes up a huge portion of the way they rate universities which many professors and education related staffs claimed that it's flawed as who knows anyone can be bribed to say good about another. There can be many discreet reasons when you rely on people's opinion.
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Then why doesn't the IAS fare well in rankings at all? http://www.ias.edu/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Advanced_Study

[Note: The IAS is an autonomous body from Princeton University, though it is closely affliated with it - and Princeton isn't even in the top 40 in Webometrics]

Perhaps let's put it another way, why doesn't anyone criticize the Webometrics ranking?
Maybe it's in the following paragraph:
QUOTE
We intend to motivate both institutions and scholars to have a web presence that reflect accurately their activities. If the web performance of an institution is below the expected position according to their academic excellence, university authorities should reconsider their web policy, promoting substantial increases of the volume and quality of their electronic publications.

Copied it word for word, and it was that part that they bolded. Are they implicitly admitting in that statement that the web performance isn't really correlated to the academic excellence if the university chooses not to put it online?
Does that also mean that if they decided to put all their papers online, open access to all, instead of in journals, they could 'manipulate' the figures, thereby making it flawed?

Maybe it is because of that implicit admission that this is not a 'serious' ranking that no one's making it a target for critiques

edit: we're clearly going off topic here too

This post has been edited by bgeh: Apr 20 2009, 12:54 AM
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