Sunday, October 12, 2008

Indian institutions in THE/QS lists


Via India edunews.net, we have a bit more info:

University    2008 Rank    2007 Rank
IIT-D 154 307
IIT-B 174 269
IIT-K 242 401-500
Delhi U 274 254
IIT-M 303 401-500

The rankings website has announced subject-wise lists as well.

The technology list features all the five original IITs in the top 100. Bombay leads off at 36, followed by Delhi (42), Kanpur (70), Madras (74) and Kharagpur (83).

Here's something that surprised me: While IIT-B, the top Indian technology institution in THE/QS, has a composite score of 49.9, IIT-KGP (the last of the IITs in the same list) comes in with about 30 percent less at 34.5. Remember, these are normalized scores, wherein the top institution (MIT, in this case) has a perfect score of 100. I wonder what this means, though: Is IIT-B about 'half as good as MIT', but IIT-KGP is only 'a third as good'?

In the top 100 in the natural sciences, only IIT-B figures at 77. The lists for both life sciences and biomedicine and social sciences have only one Indian university: Delhi University at 95 and 82, respectively. No Indian university figures in the top 100 for arts and humanities.

Here's something interesting: IIT-B figures in two top 100 lists, while IIT-D figures in only one of them. In the list that has both, IIT-B is ahead of IIT-D. But in the overall list, Delhi outranks Bombay!

4 Comments:

  1. Mahesh Shastry said...

    I wouldn't read much into this survey! It is obviously flawed, I cannot imagine any survey ranking a college like Monash University or Nanyang Technological University, or for that matter even Tsinghua ahead of colleges such as University of Michigan, University of California San Diego, Penn State University (my college), UWisc, UMD, etc.! Not to mentions the weird rankings given to the IIT's.

  2. Anonymous said...

    where is IISc ? :D

  3. Abi said...

    Anon: These rankings are only for universities offering undergraduate (or "first degree") programs. I would be worried if IISc (which is a post-graduate institution) figured in the lists!

    Also, as Mahesh Shastry says, don't read too much into them, as there's some spurious stuff in there ...

  4. Ravi Venkataraman said...

    Abi, you said, "Here's something interesting: IIT-B figures in two top 100 lists, while IIT-D figures in only one of them. In the list that has both, IIT-B is ahead of IIT-D. But in the overall list, Delhi outranks Bombay!"

    But why is this interesting? Are there only two categories that the Universities were ranked on? What if in all of the other categories that they were ranked on IIT-D was ahead of IIT-B (but neither figured in teh top 100 list) ?