Sunday, June 29, 2014

IIT-M Director Bhaskar Ramamurthi on Global University Rankings


It's good to see an institutional leader trying to drill some sense into policy-makers who ought to know better than to go blindly by global ranking exercises. Here's the concluding paragraph from Prof. Ramamurthi's op-ed in The Indian Express:

The contributions of the IITs are to be assessed along several dimensions. Some of these are relevant globally and are used by international ranking agencies, while other important ones are totally ignored. We should reflect on the relative weightage given to the dimensions assessed and not lose sight of those that are not. To the extent that the rankings tell us something about where we stand globally with respect to research, visibility, etc, they are relevant, and the IITs should strive to improve their position. Above all, we should not blindly adopt these rankings as an end in themselves, nor allow ourselves to be railroaded into pursuing select dimensions of performance while neglecting others, especially those that are critical to our national development goals.

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