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Comment by _chris_ | Hacker News Reader

"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 game, and the other is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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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)

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.

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.

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.

In my experience, those that bash MIT have been overrated for years.

See? I can use anecdotal evidence to offend swaths of people too.

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

"Ok, they've outplayed us in our game. Lets call this game terrible and start a different one with new rules!"

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).

Except of course for the "Mines ParisTech : Professional Ranking of World Universities" :D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mines_ParisTech_:_Professional...

Which is actually a really interesting ranking. Not based on academic research whatsoever.

Though, that formula for prestige has been in place for at least the last century in European and American universities.

And it has been gamed for at least the last century. Nothing new here.

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