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Category: Rankings

AHELO: Universities Behaving Badly

So there’s some excitement being generated this month with respect to the OECD’s Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO).  Roughly speaking, AHELO is the higher education equivalent of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), or the Program for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC).  It consists of a general test of critical thinking skills (based on the Collegiate Learning Assessment), plus a couple of subject-matter tests that test competencies in specific disciplines.  AHELO completed its pilot phase a

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May 21, 2015 1 Comment

Who Wins and Who Loses in the “Top 100 Under 50” Rankings

The annual Times Higher Education “Top 100 Under 50” universities came out a few weeks ago.  Australians were crowing about their success, and a few people in Canada noticed that Canada didn’t do so well – only four spots: Calgary 22nd, Simon Fraser 27th, UQAM 85th, and Concordia 96th.   So, today, we ask the question: why do young Canadian universities not fare well on these rankings? Well, one way to look at this is to ask: “who does well at these rankings?”

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May 20, 2015 1 Comment

McGill vs. UBC

In eastern parts of the country, if you use the words “the three best universities in Canada”, they look at you slightly oddly.  They know you mean U of T and McGill, but they’re not 100% sure who the third one is.  “UBC?” they ask, uncertainly. This is pure eastern myopia.  Today, I will advance the proposition that by most measures, UBC is substantially ahead of McGill, and is in fact the country’s #2 university. Let’s start with some statistics

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April 27, 2015 4 Comments

Rankings in the Middle East

If you follow rankings at all, you’ll have noticed that there is a fair bit of activity going on in the Middle East these days.  US News & World Report and Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) both published “Best Arab Universities” rankings last year; this week, the Times Higher Education (THE) produced a MENA (Middle East and North Africa) ranking at a glitzy conference in Doha. The reason for this sudden flurry of Middle East-oriented rankings is pretty clear: Gulf universities have a lot of

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February 25, 2015 2 Comments

The Problem with Global Reputation Rankings

I was in Athens this past June, at an EU-sponsored conference on rankings, which included a very intriguing discussion about the use of reputation indicators that I thought I would share with you. Not all rankings have reputational indicators; the Shanghai (ARWU) rankings, for instance, eschew them completely.  But QS and Times Higher Education (THE) rankings both weight them pretty highly (50% for QS, 35% for THE).  But this data isn’t entirely transparent.  THE, who release their World University Rankings

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September 30, 2014 3 Comments

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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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