4 ms·

"Each school’s score is based on its number of publications and citations as well as its global and regional research reputation." Oh lord... one is easy to ga

• mattlutze 11y ago
  Though, that formula for prestige has been in place for at least the last century in European and American universities.
  • seanmcdirmid 11y ago
    And it has been gamed for at least the last century. Nothing new here.
• bsder 11y ago
  Exactly, so MIT has clearly been ... Oh, wait, you mean you were implying that Tsinghua University was gaming the rankings ... MIT students, in my experience, have been overrated for years.
  • nolok 11y ago
    He is not claiming one or the other is gaming it, he is saying this is a terrible set of metrics to rank universities with
  • nolok 11y ago
    He is not claiming one or the other is gaming it, he is saying this is a terrible set of metrics to rank universities with
    • warkid 11y ago
      "Ok, they've outplayed us in our game. Lets call this game terrible and start a different one with new rules!"
      • nolok 11y ago
        See my other comment before attributing malice to my words. As a french, I've never in my life found the rules to be any good as they were biased against us and other non english speaking country (imho).
        • globuous 11y ago
          Except of course for the "Mines ParisTech : Professional Ranking of World Universities" :D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mines_ParisTech_:_Professional_Ranking_of_World_Universities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mines_ParisTech_:_Professional... Which is actually a really interesting ranking. Not based on academic research whatsoever.
  • borski 11y ago
    In my experience, those that bash MIT have been overrated for years. See? I can use anecdotal evidence to offend swaths of people too.
• nolok 11y ago
  That's how all those rankings are done. Some of them are even "worse" in that they only include english language publications, and result with US and UK taking pretty much every spot in the top 50, claiming the rest of europe is terrible. (I'm not saying that US/UK do or don't have the best universities, I'm saying that system of ranking is terrible for so many reasons)
  • arethuza 11y ago
    The Professor I worked for in the early '90s told me that he'd been involved in some ranking exercise for one of the UK funding bodies where he was deeply unpopular as he wanted to work from objective measures and then come up with a ranking whereas the standard game was apparently to work out the rankings based on which departments everyone "knew" to be best and then designing the ranking scheme to get the "right" answer. That kind of stuff, and the whole nonsense around the desperate scramble for publications really put me off of a career in academia.
  • jimsojim 11y ago
    Also, more than that these rankings should weigh much more on the quality of education rather than the research outcome because a large mass of college students are misguided through these rankings. Is it the responsibility of these ranking systems or the students themselves to be more careful? I am not sure. Another way to tackle this is to have different kind of rankings- say, Research rankings, Teaching quality rankings- following more objective metrics rather than opinion based, as arethuza mentioned in his anecdote.
• Mair 11y ago
  University scores have always been somewhat useless, just look at the criteria they are based on. At least I feel like they are heavily favoring already prestigious universities making it hard for anybody to catch up. But if you think about it without considering their past, why should MIT be better rated than Tsinghua? As of now they both are doing amazing research and I don't think that MIT is gaming the scores any less than Tsinghua is.