How not to do rankings?
Recently Educationtimes.com, a part of of Times of India, together with Gfk Mode, has done a ranking of universities across India in various disciplines. There methodology, in their own words, was as follows:
This survey was open to prominent universities across India and invitations were sent to 225 universities.
Among the 225 prominent universities invited, 136 participated. This constitutes around 61% participation.
Some universities refused to participate. Whereas many universities could not provide the required information within our time frame.
The contact persons at the universities were: the registrars, deputy registrars, principal, dean or the administrative heads.
That is it. They sent the surveys. Regardless of whether people participated or not; regardless of the veracity of what was given back; they made a ranking.
The parameters they used may seem reasonable to many, but to me there is a very simple way to rank Universities and Colleges in India. Just use faculty quality as the first parameter and if their is a tie then use the student quality as the second parameter. That’s it!
2 comments April 1st, 2009