Friday, March 20, 2009

How are universities ranked?

Januari lalu, Webomatrics, salah satu pengeluar ranking universitas dunia, menempatkan UGM di nomer yg cukup membanggakan. Nomer 64 bo...., tertinggi diantara universitas indonesia lainnya. Sampai-sampai DIKTI pun menggunakan ranking ini sbg referensi, lihat aja di halaman depan http://www.dikti.go.id. Siapa dulu dong Menteri nya? hehehe...

Sebagai alumni, salut deh buat UGM. Tapi sebenarnya, menurut saya yg hebat adalah 'TIM WEB UGM', bukan UGM itu sendiri. Loh kok ngono? Iyo, karena Webomatrics adalah 'world universities' ranking on the web'. Artinya Tim Web UGM telah berhasil 'memamerkan UGM' dalam dunia maya, ya to?

"Lha nek dudu ranking sing neng web, UGM ki nomer piro le?"
"Wah susah njawabnya mbak.. :-("

Sebenarnya banyak sekali ranking universitas yg dibuat oleh berbagai institusi, baik lokal maupun internasional, bisa di-refer di sini. Universitas2 di Malaysia banyak me-refer dan berusaha menaikkan ranking universitas versi THES, the Times Higher Education Supplement. Indonesia (baca: DIKTI) dengan Webomatrics-nya. Tiap-tiap versi ranking punya pendekatan masing-masing, yg meliputi criteria, indikator dan bagaimana measurement process nya.

Sebagai contoh, coba kita copy-paste criteria yg dipake oleh tiga versi peranking yg cukup dikenal: THES, Shanghai (ARWU) dan Webomatrics. Yg terakhir dipilih karena ini yg dipakai DIKTI.

1. THES-QS

IndicatorExplanationWeighting
Academic Peer ReviewComposite score drawn from peer review survey (which is divided into five subject areas). 6,354 responses in 2008.40%
Employer ReviewScore based on responses to employer survey. 2,339 responses in 2008.10%
Faculty Student RatioScore based on student faculty ratio20%
Citations per FacultyScore based on research performance factored against the size of the research body 20%
International FacultyScore based on proportion of international faculty5%
International StudentsScore based on proportion of international students5%


Detail-nya, silahkan baca di sini.

2. Shanghai (Academic Ranking of World Universities). Baca lengkap di sini.

Criteria
Indicator
Code
Weight
Quality of Education Alumni of an institution winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals Alumni 10%
Quality of Faculty Staff of an institution winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals Award 20%
Highly cited researchers in 21 broad subject categories HiCi 20%
Research Output Articles published in Nature and Science* N&S 20%
Articles indexed in Science Citation Index-expanded, and Social Science Citation Index PUB 20%
Per Capita
Performance
Per capita academic performance of an institution PCP 10%
Total
0
0
100%


3. Webomatrics

Size (S). Number of pages recovered from four engines: Google, Yahoo, Live Search and Exalead. For each engine, results are log-normalised to 1 for the highest value. Then for each domain, maximum and minimum results are excluded and every institution is assigned a rank according to the combined sum. --> 50%
Visibility (V). The total number of unique external links received (inlinks) by a site can be only confidently obtained from Yahoo Search, Live Search and Exalead. For each engine, results are log-normalised to 1 for the highest value and then combined to generate the rank. --> 20%
Rich Files (R). After evaluation of their relevance to academic and publication activities and considering the volume of the different file formats, the following were selected: Adobe Acrobat (.pdf), Adobe PostScript (.ps), Microsoft Word (.doc) and Microsoft Powerpoint (.ppt). These data were extracted using Google and merging the results for each filetype after log-normalising in the same way as described before. --> 15%
Scholar (Sc). Google Scholar provides the number of papers and citations for each academic domain. These results from the Scholar database represent papers, reports and other academic items. --> 15%


Nah, sekarang kita bisa lihat, bagaimana mereka menentukan ranking tersebut. Sungguh sangat beda. Perbedaan criteria dan weighting sangat berpengaruh pada hasil ranking.

"Lha terus versi mana yg kita sebaiknya ikuti le?"
"Wah itu tergantung demand mas..."

Maksudnya, masa' ya UGM mo ngikuti ranking versi THES ato Shanghai, ga bakalan ketemu kalau sampeyan nyari. Buktiin di sini dan situ. Saya memahami bahwa dalam rangka 'image building', memang betul langkah DIKTI utk menggunakan versi Webomatrics, karena di versi inilah nama unversitas2 indonesia (paling tidak) muncul. Dan saya faham juga kenapa UKM selalu nge-push postgraduate students utk publish di journal impak tinggi.

Wis berhenti mbaca blog, mari kita lanjutin nulis paper utk submit ke high-impact-journal....!