All you Russian-Truthers are killing all the fun. Reuters indeed. >:P
Inclined toward the reputational ratings, which, while as spurious and arbitrarily weighted as everything else in this ranking, reflect something–viz. the spurious and arbitrary (?) perceptions of [academics, supposedly].
http://roundranking.com/ranking.html
Teaching reputation (2017):
- Harvard
- MIT
- Stanford
- Cambridge
- Berkeley
- Oxford
- Princeton
- UCLA
- Yale
- Cal Tech
Research reputation:
- Harvard
- MIT
- Stanford
- Berkeley
- Cambridge
- Oxford
- Princeton
- UCLA
- Yale
- Cal Tech
Reputation outside region:
- ???
- Harvard
- MIT
- Stanford
- Cambridge
- Berkeley
- Oxford
- Princeton
- UCLA
- Cal Tech
(And a rating from last year, 2016, based purely on “research productivity” and reputation, though two of the metrics heavily favor international schools like Oxford and Cambridge.). http://roundranking.com/performance-rankings.html
1 Imperial College London
2 California Institute of Technology (Caltech)
3 University of Oxford
4 University of Cambridge
5 Karolinska Institute
6 Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne
7 University College London
8 Princeton University
9 Harvard University
10 Leiden University
11 University of California, Berkeley
12 University of Geneva
13 Wageningen University and Research Center
14 University of Edinburgh
15 Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven)
16 University of Chicago
17 King`s College London
18 Erasmus University Rotterdam
19 University of California, Santa Barbara
20 University of Toronto
21 Utrecht University
22 Technical University of Munich
23 Stanford University
24 National University of Singapore
25 University of Groningen
[The other rankings posted on this thread, like the QS and THES, also look much different when stripped of the particularly bad attempts to measure “quality of teaching.”]
What a tedium.
@Chrchill “YES Putin is severely concerned whether Stanford is ahead of Harvard in a ranking. It is all a giant Russian secret service plot as this involves Russian national security.”
For the record, that is not remotely close to what I said.
They just decide on what metrics to use and crunch the numbers and score. The data actually comes from these guys.
Sorry, previous post got cut off. The data actually comes from these guys.
Probably was just picked up by the RUssians.
You know they’re watching this thread. =))
@Parapraxes, welcome to CC. For a first post, that was long-winded. ;))
It is Russian. And it has as much credence as the “Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU)” aka Shanghai Jiao Tong University rankings from communist China 
@FStratford I beg to differ on the Shanghai Ranking (ARWU). I think that is actually one of the most accurate and unbiased rankings despite coming from China. It is based more on research publications than on more subjective criteria like reputation or student evaluation, etc.
Quoted: “It is praised for its objective methodology but draws some condemnation for narrowly focusing on raw research power, undermining humanities and quality of instruction.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Ranking_of_World_Universities
@85bears46 The RUR ranking is actually just as objective as the ARWU if you look at the methodology. In fact, it is more objective because it does not undercount the humanities and quality of instruction.
So you may disagree but its true. RUR has just as much credence as ARWU. Both objective. Both coming from dictatorial, militaristic, totalitarian government controlled countries. There is not much room for dissent (there is more freedom in Russia than China). “Former” communists (China is still politically communist, although economically less so)
So even if one accuses Russia of “manipulating” the RUR and should not be trusted, the ARWU is worse because it is from a country that is much much much worse when it comes to freedoms, independence of the academe, the press, and everything else.
so yes, I stand by my earlier statement: The Russian RUR has as much credence as (if not more than) the “Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU)” aka Shanghai Jiao Tong University rankings from fucking communist China
Oh for Pete’s sake people! Many of the PhDs in Russia plagiarized the work of others in getting their degrees. I remember a case where someone’s else study was taken word for word. Except they substituted (I believe) the word “chocolate” for “beef” throughout the dissertation. Funny thing is they did not word check it and missed some of the substitutions but still earned the degree. What a joke. I am leaving this thread and hope you enjoy the Party! :O) :-h
@Sam-I-Am your post does not mean anything. What does it have to do with whether the RUR can be trusted?
I can say that “many of the cops in America kill black people for fun”. It is technically true since many needs to only mean >2. In your case you have 1 case cited to prove that “many” PhDs in Russia plagiarize. But regardless, neither means anything wrt this thread.
@Sam-I-Am what do the Russian phd have to do with the price of eggs ? A coherent ranking methodology based on transparent data was provided. You can question the method, but your point is utterly irrelevant.
What is the “method” of this “[methodology]?” What does it signify? Why is this helterskelter confabulation more relevant to the “quality of instruction and research” it purports to measure than the “Russian PhD” quibble is to this thread?
As I say, I would salvage only the reputation ratings–if anything–because one might assume that they represent something about the beliefs of actual scholars, even if that something is a nothing.
“[T]ransparent” and “coherent” indeed, like a clogged strainer dunked in a methodographic abysm! Can you replicate the results; can you explain why “Academic Staff per Student” and “Academic Staff per Bachelors Degrees Awarded” signify 40% of a school’s power of teaching?
Let’s not speak of errors in data aggregation and so on…
@Parapraxes Still does not make RUR less reliable than ARWU which people seem to accept because it confirms their own biases. The same faults you find in RUR are present in ARWU. Ergo, if one thinks the ARWU is a reasonable ranking, it should consider RUR the same way. Either both are junk or both are okay.
The data is from Thompson Reuters, so there goes the errors in data that you implied at the end of your post, btw.
You don’t like “Academic Staff per Student” and “Academic Staff per Bachelors Degrees Awarded”? Why not? There are arguably two components of what constitutes good education - quality and quantity of service providers. Yet you like “reputation” survey rankings which are even more subjective.
depends on standards… top universities have their specific strengths and weaknesses :-bd
You might have had a formidable point indeed!–if I had said:
- that I "[accepted]" the ARWU ranking (though I do prefer it, because I have an idea of what it measures, even if "what it measures" is not "the strength of a university")
- that I "liked" reputation surveys (as opposed to favoring them to everything else in this ranking--rather, preferring the "even more subjective [views of scholars who I assume hire other scholars and have passing familiarity with the graduates and research that certain schools produce]" to the "uninterpretable")**
- that "errors in data aggregation" means "errors in data sourcing" (though I don't see why schools cannot farce Thomson Reuters data if they can *Rorschach*, for instance, their "Student-Faculty ratios" in Common Data Sets, and not all of the information comes from Thomson Reuters at any rate)
- that I "don't like" those two metrics when I only used them as examples (although I don't know if they represent 40% of a school's quality of instruction, and I do know that one can add and subtend a million million million more variables to skew the results to whatever end-- 4.2. can every Professor in every school teach every student? does every division of every school intermingle with every other? might a school include non-instructional faculty (esp. medical researchers) in its count? do these metrics reward schools who admit few and graduate fewer, and does such a skew toward the minuscule contradict certain other variables' skew toward larger programs?)
**Would prefer to have the “transparent data” with which the ranking is supposedly constructed rather than the full Rorschach of metrics and weightings. Perhaps that information is to be found somewhere.
Yeah but… with your points, you are now arguing that ALL rankings are bad and not just this RUR ranking. Which gets back to my point, this RUR is not worse than widely-accepted ARWU. And that is regardless of whether or not you have personal objections to rankings in general.
Transparent data? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Make your own ranking from scratch, maybe?
And then we can, in turn, criticize it as I am sure it will be imperfect like all other rankings out there, reputable or not.
No. “[All] rankings are bad”–which I did not say–does not mean “all rankings are equal.”
The ARWU metrics look like reasonable proxies for research power (*prima facie *), though one could use other metrics or weight each metric differently. Those who dismiss ARWU as irrelevant might still accept that a University’s numbers of Nobel Prize winners and highly-cited researchers reveal something about its “contributions to knowledge.” Indeed: the ranking seems internally consistent, even if consistently wrong. (N.B. I imagine that schools can skew their “research income” or “academic staff” totals with minimal trouble; falsifying Nobel and HiCi counts is harder.)
What does the RUR demonstrate? Perhaps the number of ways in which you can rank Harvard #1, but not much more. Since the ranking agency provides even less data than the ARWU compilers–only each school’s ranking in each category, as if the extent of difference doesn’t matter–the RUR comes off still worse in comparison. The RUR’s convolutedness brings it to incoherence; its opaqueness, to unsalvageability.