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THE rankings have been publicised by the leading UK newspapers, such as The Guardian and The Times (which are not part of the same organisation).
Several universities in the UK and the Asia-Pacific region have also commented on the rankings.

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The THE - QS World University Rankings is an annual publication that ranks the "Top 200 World Universities", and is published by Times Higher Education (THE) and Quacquarelli Symonds (QS). The full listings feature on the QS website and on the THE website. They have been running since 2004 and are broken down by subject and region.
The ranking weights are:
- Peer Review Score (40%)
- Recruiter Review (10%)
- International Faculty Score (5%)
- International Students Score (5%)
- Faculty/Student Score (20%)
- Citations/Faculty Score (20%).
THE - QS World University Rankings (Top 20)
Commentary
The THE rankings have been publicised by the leading UK newspapers, such as The Guardian and The Times (which are not part of the same organisation).
Several universities in the UK and the Asia-Pacific region have also commented on the rankings. Vice-Chancellor of Massey University, Professor Judith Kinnear says the THE-QS ranking is a “wonderful external acknowledgement of several University attributes, including the quality of its research, research training, teaching and employability.“ She says the rankings are a true measure of a university’s ability to fly high internationally: “The Times Higher Education ranking provides a rather more and more sophisticated, robust and well rounded measure of international and national ranking than either New Zealand’s Performance Based Research Fund (PBRF) measure or the Shanghai rankings.”
Ian Leslie, the pro-vice chancellor for research at Cambridge University said: "It is very reassuring that the collegiate systems of Cambridge and Oxford continue to be valued by and respected by peers, and that the excellence of teaching and of research at both institutions is reflected in these rankings."
The vice-chancellor of Oxford University, Dr. John Hood, said: "The exceptional talents of Oxford's students and staff are on display daily. This last year has seen many faculty members gaining national and international plaudits for their teaching, scholarship and research, and our motivated students continue to achieve in a number of fields, not just academically. Our place amongst the handful of truly world-class universities, despite the financial challenges we face, is testament to the quality and the drive of the members of this university's environment."
Vice-Chancellor of the University of Wollongong in Australia, Professor Gerard Sutton, said the ranking was a testament to a university’s standing in the international community, identifying… “an elite group of world-class universities.”
Criticism
The Academic Ranking of World Universities by Shanghai Jiao Tong University has been suggested to be more respectable despite its perceived bias towards the natural sciences. The THE Rankings have been criticized for placing too much emphasis on peer review, which receives 40% of the overall score. Some have expressed concern on the manner in which the peer review has been carried out. In a certain report, Peter Wills from the University of Auckland, New Zealand wrote of the QS-THE Ranking:
Some errors have also been reported on the faculty-student ratio used in the ranking. At the held at Christchurch, New Zealand in August 2007, presented a paper which outlines the fundamental flaws underlying the QS-THES Rankings. A similar article (also published by the same author) appeared in newspaper in December 2006. Some of the points mentioned include:
- The pool of responses is heavily weighted in favour of academic ‘peers’ from nations where the Times is well-known, such as the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and so on.
- Results have been highly volatile. There have been many sharp rises and falls, especially in the second half of the THES top200 where small differences in metrics can generate large rankings effects. Fudan in China has oscillated between 72 and 195, RMIT in Australia between 55 and 146. In the US, Emory has risen from 173 to 56 and Purdue fell from 59 to 127.
- The performance of the Australian universities is also inflated. Despite a relatively poor citation rate and moderate staffing ratios they do exceptionally well in the reputational academic survey and internationalisation indicators, especially that for students. Australia has 13 of the THES top 200 and appears as the third strongest system in the world, ahead of Japan, Canada, Germany and western Europe (the G7 nations). This makes sense in relation to Australia’s international marketing but not all round performance or reputation.
Although THES-QS had introduced several changes in methodology in 2007 which were aimed at addressing some of the above criticisms, the ranking has continued to attract criticisms. In an article in the peer-reviewed BMC Journal authored by several scientists from USA and Greece, it was pointed out:
Alex Usher, Vice President of the Educational Policy Institute in USA, commented:
The latest criticism of the QS-THE league tables came from Andrew Oswald, Professor of Economics at University of Warwick:
See also
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