Northwestern and USNews trade insults online over college rankings

[Gator88NE]

The Times rankings are always interesting, but they have their own issues, including being “gamed” by universities.

33% of the rankings are based on Reputation Surveys, and everything is getting “normalized”.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/methodology-world-university-rankings-2018

The worse gaming happens with the Citation (30% of the overall score) metric:

In 2015-16, we excluded papers with more than 1,000 authors because they were having a disproportionate impact on the citation scores of a small number of universities. Since last year, we have designed a method for reincorporating these papers. Working with Elsevier, we have developed a new fractional counting approach that ensures that all universities where academics are authors of these papers will receive at least 5 per cent of the value of the paper, and where those that provide the most contributors to the paper receive a proportionately larger contribution.