University rankings are prime examples of "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
The amount of worthless papers, international exchanges etc. I've seen at my university is astounding.
this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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Nothing is perfect, but it seems reasonable to rank universities based on their performance in education attainment and research?
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?
Push for research outputs can also create perverse incentives for rapid publishing in whatever is considered quality journals - which are usually themselves associated with universities - rather than the pursuit of quality research and academic integrity.
It leads to increased strain on researvhers and a unfruitful obsession with any kind of academic output that can be easily counted. Of course research outputs are inherently important, but the whole academic publishing industry has just gotten weird the last decade or so.
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.
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.
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. *Edit
utrecht uni w! munir would be so proud.
Sounds like a great university!
it sure is! my (unofficial) national hero on human rights (who got murdered by dictatorship regime back then) went there to study.