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Comment by nolok | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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.

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