The fact that Utrecht University does not appear in the world ranking of universities this year was a conscious choice by the university itself. Utrecht University said it did not provide any data to the makers of the British trade magazine Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings, so they...
It is “virtually impossible to capture the quality of an entire university with all the different courses and disciplines in one figure," the university said.
Utrecht University said it did not provide any data to the makers of the British trade magazine Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings, so they couldn’t determine a score. According to Utrecht University, the rankings place “too much emphasis on scoring and competition,” while the university says it considers collaboration and openness of scientific research to be more important.
Yes, in the business world this often comes with the Icarus paradox, a phenomenon that eventually leads to a business's failure by the very elements that brought its temporary success before.
How do you rank research output consistently. Every university is expected to create their own exam content, how do you effectively measure education attainment across universities?
I think this is quite a common criticism to have, but a top-100 uni like this probably profits from keeping the status quo. Takes a bit of courage to step up.
Not courage, but integrity. It's easy to criticize anything, if you don't have to pay any price. You can either cuddle yourself comfortly in your nice words or act on them, but only the latter is what counts.
The "integrity" part is a very valid criticism. A big part of these rankings is how many papers the faculty publish per year. So you see a lot of higher ranked universities' professors adding their names to a lot of reasearches where they didn't really do anything except review/advise.
Good someone , i.e. Utrecht, started to bail out of the current ranking system. Continental Universities are hard to compare with British & American ones, afaik. The teacher- student contact is more on the foreground compared to the latter.
Ergo, if teachers need to write papers all the time to maintain ranking, they'll have actually less time to bother with teaching and maintaining contact with students progress & question. Imo, this is a very important element in (higher) education.
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