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Will tweak methodology, says Times Higher Education after IITs continue boycott of rankings

Six IITs have snubbed the THE’s widely observed university list, citing lack of transparency in its ranking procedure.

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New Delhi: British magazine Times Higher Education (THE) has said it will tweak their performance grading methodology in order to address concerns of the six IITs which have boycotted its global rankings for a second consecutive year.

In a written response to ThePrint, Ritin Malhotra, THE’s Regional Director of the South Asian Region, said, “After dialogue in 2019, we have engaged in constant public debate ensuring that they have been kept updated on the progress with WUR 3.0 methodology and we ran a special webinar session on this with IIT’s last year in 2021. We also covered this again in the India Forum earlier this year in February 2022 on our future plans to tweak the methodology, to take into account the IIT’s concerns, and to explore the implications of our methodological change.”

In 2020, after indicating there was a lack of transparency over the magazine’s performance grading methodology, seven IITs including IIT Delhi, IIT Bombay, IIT Guwahati, IIT Madras, IIT Roorkee, IIT Kanpur and IIT Kharagpur had refused to participate in the rankings.

However, IIT Guwahati joined the rankings this year.

Stating they will continue the boycott, IIT Delhi and Bombay spokespersons said Wednesday, “The Institute’s stand continues to not participate in the Times Higher Education Rankings (THE) due to lack of transparency in the ranking process.”

In 2020, the premier institutes had cited a problem with allowing participating institutions to use collaborative research projects to bump up their score on the citation metric. They claimed that research papers of this nature had high citation by virtue of multiple authors associated with it.

While the institutes refused to comment on whether they would like to hold a dialogue with the ranking institution, THE in its response said they “plan to hold further discussions with them in the coming weeks”.

THE publishes annually a list of the best universities in the world, based on several criteria, and is among the most widely observed higher education rankings in its field.

Times Higher Education Ranking 2022

While the top IITs continued their boycott, THE released its World University Rankings on Wednesday. The Indian institute of Science, which is the best educational institute in the country as per NIRF rankings, found a spot in the 301-399 bracket. A total of 75 education institutes from India had participated in the rankings. India was the sixth most represented country in the rankings, however none of these institutes could make it to the top 100.

Seven IITs made it to the list this year, including IIT Ropar (501-600), IIT Indore (601-800), IIT Gandhinagar ((801-1000), IIT Patna (801-1000), IIT Bhubaneswar (1001-1200), IIT Guwahati (1001-1200), which re-joined this year after its absence for two years, and IIT Mandi (1001-1200).


Also read: IITs revamp curriculum, make study holistic and relevant to industry standards


 

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