Ben Sowter, Head of the QS Intelligence Unit, answers questions about the rankings.
1) What are the QS World University Rankings?
The QS World University Rankings are a league table of the world’s top universities embracing aspects of research quality, teaching quality, graduate employability and internationalisation to give a range of stakeholders, in particular prospective students, a simple tool to shortlist universities in which they may be interested.
2) Why were these specific criteria selected and why these specific weightings applied?
The selection of criteria and their respective indicators are the most subjective aspect of any ranking. Whilst universities are often focused on a wide variety of missions, QS believes that any university that seriously aspires to be considered world class needs to build key strengths in our four broad criteria of research quality, teaching quality, graduate employability and internationalisation. The subsequent selection of indicators and weightings is based on both what data is feasible to collect on a global level and their relative appropriateness to measure the criteria concerned.
3) Why are you sticking to the 40% weighting on the academic peer review despite the criticism it has attracted?
We have stated for some time, that if we can identify additional reliable measures of teaching quality then we may well reduce the emphasis on our academic peer review. Every criterion of every ranking that has ever been devised has attracted criticism, but here are the facts: to our knowledge the academic peer review indicator is based on the largest survey of its kind ever conducted to date; the academic peer review used in the QS World University Rankings is currently the only measure of research quality used in any global ranking that is truly discipline independent. As a result institutions with strengths in Arts and Social Sciences perform to a degree within the QS Rankings where they are entirely overlooked elsewhere.
4) What measures will be taken to ensure that 2010 Peer Review response rates are sufficiently high to justify the weighting that it is given in the overall assessment?
We are pursuing a number of different strategies to boost response in 2010. We are reaching out to more channels than ever to attract response for our surveys in 2010, translating our surveys into additional languages and specifically targeting countries where we have traditionally not attracted as strong responses as we might like. That said, we have dramatically grown our response levels every year so far and for the last three years the results have stabilised significantly, suggesting that further boosting response levels will have at best a small effect on the results.
5) What steps are you taking to ensure that the Academic Peer Review response data is adequately representative of the international academic community, and not disproportionately biased towards UK/US institutions?
The Peer Review response has always been weighted by region to smooth much of the potential bias – in fact much of the criticism against it has suggested that the Peer Review results are biased against US institutions rather than towards them. Additionally, in 2008, we separated the domestic and international contexts in the survey, which now means that domestic responses for domestic institutions now only count for a limited proportion of the peer review score regardless of whether we have 100 or 10,000 responses from that country.
6) Is it possible for an international assessment of universities to be objective and unbiased?
The selection of indicators and criteria for a ranking are by their nature subjective. Most indicators, whether based on hard data or surveys carry some degree of bias whether in favour of history, particular geography, pedagogy, culture or discipline. More objective assessments come in the form of accreditations or ratings, classifications and interactive systems where the user identifies their own criteria and weightings. QS has projects in active development on all of these fronts but they all lack the power of a published ranking in drawing attention to the important question of university choice – they are better employed to answer them. So the solutions QS has in development will complement the main ranking.
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