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About LinkBacksits not the top 6 thats are the problem..its the other 100 odd......the top tier are good and pretty indepednet and have always recruitmed students by methofds other than those advised by the state eductaion systemOriginally Posted by Trampas
its not the top 6 thats are the problem..its the other 100 odd......the top tier are good and pretty indepednet and have always recruitmed students by methofds other than those advised by the state eductaion system
"Sometimes the best thing a government can do is simply get out of the way"-Vince Cable
Another 15 or so are represented in the top 100. Take out the former Polys and the UK colleges are more than holding their own.
also scotland doesnt have tuition fees...and has some of the nbest UK ones....and its hard to take out the pollys they are the majority of the Universitues in the place
"Sometimes the best thing a government can do is simply get out of the way"-Vince Cable
thanks for the listing Gimpanzee, but I would put little faith in a list that has no non-English speaking institution in the top 20 and fails to find a place for a German university in the top 50. Plus they listed nearly half a dozen Swiss institutions, yet the best university in Switzerland, the University of St. Gallen, doesn't make the top 200.
Bias writ large with little or no knowledge of life outside the Anglocentric bubble.
Fianna Fail - The Loss of Sovereignty Party.
I can't speak for all unis i used to work in the registry function of one...
Lecture timetabling is required because of the changes in programmes, academic staff and the choices made by students in electives etc also physical locations influence timetabling .
Unis are directly competeing for the best students and must offer hi quality and diverse courses/modules...
Lecture palnning is needed because course content changes - maybe not as much in some areas of inteerest but definitely in others...
UCD and trinity are both delivering high qualitry and much sought after research - they are attracting researchers from all over the world
Irish universities are busiest when the students aren't around (except christmas!!)
The early bird may get the worm - but the second mouse gets the cheese.
Extremely good point. However, in fairness to the Times, they do this to sell papers, and the list is somewhat more useful than the Chinese one, which indexes science and technology universities only.
The EU are actually looking at this at the moment, they've issued a call for funding to create better university rankings.
The survey itself seems well designed, but again, the issue is that of translation. European countries probably score lower because of lack of surveys returned from these countries by academics and employers. The language factor is also an issue when looking at citations per faculty, which is 10% of the total.
All in all, its a better survey that I thought, and certainly far better than the Irish survey conducted by the Sunday times.
Well one must ask is if it's supposedly the best university in Switzerland why it didn't make it in the top 200 whilst others did. So either the ranking is flawed, or St. Gallen isn't the best. Why do you suppose it would be the ranking that is flawed?
Ireland interests are best secured within a more dynamic EU. Vote YES to Lisbon.
Off the top of my head, Prof Luke O'Neill's research group in TCD's Biochemistry Dept.
Ireland interests are best secured within a more dynamic EU. Vote YES to Lisbon.
These university ranking surveys are open to criticism from many angles.
The QS-THE survey is heavily dependent on a type of 'peer review' (40% of total points) that should not be taken too seriously. QS (Quacquarelli Symonds) is a commercial company, heavily business oriented, that promotes study abroad. The QS-THE survey is, unsurprisingly, aimed at a target audience residing in countries where The Times is actually read. Hence, a strong bias in favour of anglophone countries can be expected. I have no doubt that the 'peers' who complete the on-line survey (which includes some financial inducements) are disproportionately English-speaking and more likely to be working in the UK, USA, Australia, etc.
Andrew Oswald, Professor or Economics at the University of Warwick (which is consistently ranked highly) accuses the QS-THE survey of wishful thinking and dangerous self-deception. Writing in The Independent in 2007 he says:
2007 saw the release, by a UK commercial organisation, of an unpersuasive world university ranking. This put Oxford and Cambridge at equal second in the world. Lower down, at around the bottom of the world top-10, came University College London, above MIT. A university with the name of Stanford appeared at number 19 in the world. The University of California at Berkeley was equal to Edinburgh at 22 in the world.
Such claims do us a disservice. The organisations who promote such ideas should be unhappy themselves, and so should any supine UK universities who endorse results they view as untruthful. Using these league table results on your websites, universities, if in private you deride the quality of the findings, is unprincipled and will ultimately be destructive of yourselves, because if you are not in the truth business what business are you in, exactly?
Worse, this kind of material incorrectly reassures the UK government that our universities are international powerhouses.
Let us instead, a bit more coolly, do what people in universities are paid to do. Let us use reliable data to try to discern the truth. In the last 20 years, Oxford has won no Nobel Prizes. (Nor has Warwick.) Cambridge has done only slightly better. Stanford University in the United States, purportedly number 19 in the world, garnered three times as many Nobel Prizes over the past two decades as the universities of Oxford and Cambridge did combined....
Another very obvious flaw in the 'rankings' is the fact that, in any field of study, choosing the right university is often a matter of looking at the strengths and weaknesses of a particular Department, and, especially for graduate studies, may even come down to working with a particular specialist, who may be the best in the world in that limited field, but chooses to work in a relatively obscure university.
Having studied/worked in universities in five countries (three continents), I take the QS-THE rankings with a very large grain of salt!
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One of the great human delusions is that everyone has a doss job except ourselves. And that you can teach or lecture off the top of your head. As a second level teacher I know the long hours on planning and correction put in by even the most casual colleague just to survive in the classroom.
When doing postgraduate work in UCD I was very impressed by the professionalism and dedication of the staff, who, by mid-summer, were exhausted from the demands of research, supervision of theses, preparation of lectures etc. My thesis supervisor took no summer holidays and seemed to be at everyone's beck and call. The need to publish research, finish some scholarly book, write papers etc kept her working late into the night. Not all Third Level colleges require you to research, publish etc, but UCD did not appear to be an idler's paradise by any means.
Thank you GREENWITHIRONY, and especially PATSLATT for your informed and perceptive comments on this subject.
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