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

Indicator	Explanation	Weighting
Academic Peer Review	Composite score drawn from peer review survey (which is divided into five subject areas). 6,354 responses in 2008.	40%
Employer Review	Score based on responses to employer survey. 2,339 responses in 2008.	10%
Faculty Student Ratio	Score based on student faculty ratio	20%
Citations per Faculty	Score based on research performance factored against the size of the research body	20%
International Faculty	Score based on proportion of international faculty	5%
International Students	Score based on proportion of international students	5%

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....!