When choosing where you study, university ranking is a valuable tool that can help you compare universities and decide which ones are right for you. Rankings allow you to see how a university performs against others in various areas, such as teaching quality and global partnerships.
However, it is important to remember that rankings are based on a range of different factors, and that each ranking league table will have their own methodology. This means that a university’s rank could be affected by the way these factors are weighted.
For example, the QS ranking uses scientometrics to assess research quality, with indicators for publications, citations and impact. Publications include scholarly articles, reviews and notes published in academic journals. The ranking also takes into account a university’s discipline focus, since some fields publish more than others. The ranking also includes the number of books that are published by a university, although this is weighed less than papers.
Another factor taken into consideration is the student-to-faculty ratio and graduate employment rate, both of which can indicate the quality of teaching at a university. It also considers the university’s financial resources, its international staff and students and its research output. The teaching metric is weighted most heavily at 30 percent, while the research and discovery metric is given 15 percent of the total score.
In addition to these individual metrics, the QS ranking also gives a global overall score and a Subject ranking in 227 subjects. It also combines the results of the two rankings to provide a more complete picture of a university’s performance.