University of Nairobi is in a race to become internationally and academically viable to an increasingly interconnected world. Its rankings have gradually become an issue of concern in its management of academic stratification in a globally competitive community. Several mechanisms with different methodologies by these ranking systems have been developed to rank the university. Ranking of University of Nairobi (UON) has been done qualitatively and quantitatively. While most of the ranking systems are qualitative, there are those that are quantitative and this study makes a comparison of a qualitative and quantitative assessment of UON through two ranking systems while drawing a correlation with other ranking systems to establish the trajectory of such ranking system and identifying academic bias in their assessment. To achieve this, the study uses a qualitative review to highlight a number of inconsistencies in the methodologies applied to rank UON. Five main ranking tools commonly applied to the world's universities are reviewed, namely Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), Webometrics ranking (WRWU), Times Higher Education (THE), U.S News.com and Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU). The study established that bias exists in the rankings thus causing inconsistencies in UON's placement in different rankings. Suggestions for academic transparency through timely publications and quick access to departmental and institutional data for better ranking exercises are proposed.

This study is guided specific errand on a dissimilar dataset as in previous study but integrated in way of objective and approach. The study harmonizes the structural estimations concocted in previous studies concerning the impact, relations and associations of and/or amid the five main parameters to and/or amid the academic quality while addressing assortments of micro but different objectives under this errand. Since the previous studies aimed at explicating the comparative significance, directions and correlational characteristics of UJS & UON's, the current study as partly an extrapolation for this: 1) does robustness diagnostics for the impacts and directions identified towards academic quality in previous study as well as affirming the consistency of the result; 2) innovatively implicates anew objective of the study when the paired homologous structural departments are implicated into the mediation and moderation relation effects, and how the integrative change the academic quality of their respective universities; 3) thirdly, the study integrates into new objective when their inter-correlational and analogous comparison is made to identify their temporal similarities and differences while addressing the gap and variance for academic development policy formulation.

The author started by describing the physical characteristics of the new dataset in a bid to understand their spatial underlying behavior. This is done by displaying the results in Table 1 with the characteristics of UON being presented in Table 1. Generally, this are the results which will be employed in the structural equation modelling to find the influence research, teaching, attitude, performance and internationalization has on academic quality. First, generally, across the Table 1, we see the main parameters of study, comprising of the construct parameters teaching, research, performance, internationalization and learner attitude with each of the constructs having been parameterized by the respective actual variables. Their respective means and standard deviation have also been presented.Thus, based from the Table 1, we see that, and starting with the construct parameter teaching, it has been parameterized by the actual variables; university reputation, curriculum quality, student ration and teaching quality. Starting with teaching, we see that the reputation has mean value of 3.0, curriculum quality 1.3, student-teacher ratio 3.2 and teaching quality 4.0. A view of their means shows that the highest is by teaching quality and lowest by curriculum quality with the implication that the most stressed activity is teaching quality unlike curriculum quality in that order. Going by research construct, research reputation has the mean value 8.6, research reputation survey 2.4, conditional peer reviewed publication 4.1, research grant sufficiency 1.6, influenced research direction 2.4 while cited writing has the statistics 0.7. This implies that under research the research reputation is the most actualized parameter. Based on attitude the fact that the learner has an attitude towards the teaching staff and towards the curriculum is 4.3 and 3.2 respectively and for an implication that the attitude of the learners is significant. If it's for internationalization, we realize that the parameterization variables such as the reputation satisfaction (with mean 3.2), reputation influenced institution selection, alumni employability (with mean 4.1) and the ratio of domestic to international students (2.5) have the highest means compared to the Nobel prize aligned preference variable (mean value 1.4). If it regards performance, the participation in per capita activity variable (mean value 0.1) is the least activity while the research impact transformation (4.3) and the education quality (4.9) have the highest contribution of the mean activity. Based on the above parameter characteristic, an overview of these parameters shows them as relatively significant and important in describing the constructed variables important in demystifying relevant contribution of the constructs to represent the academic quality of the university of Nairobi.

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