The Use of University Rankings in the United Kingdom

Eccles, Charles

doi:10.1080/0379772022000071904

Cited by 51 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…University league tables are published each year in the UK in leading newspapers using the statistical data from central Higher Education Statistical Agency, the national funding agencies, and the national Quality Assurance Agency mainly to guide prospective students in their choice of future enrollment (Eccles, 2002).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is measuring the knowledge creation of universities possible?: A review of university rankings

Olcay

Bulu

2017

Technological Forecasting and Social Change

124

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University ranking indexes are considered very useful benchmarking tools in comparing the performance of universities around the world. Being placed in these prestigious indexes provides a strong advertisement for a university and helps them to attract high-quality students and academicians all over the world. However, there are some important deficiencies of university ranking indexes such as taking into account the whole university as a single unit without differentiating according to different fields of study or research, being limited to some wellknown universities, and not considering institutional characteristics such as size or age. This study aims to explore the leading global university rankings to determine the similarities and differences in terms of their ranking criteria, main indicators, modeling choices, and the effects of these on the rankings. Designating the Times Higher Education World Rankings as the base ranking, a comprehensive comparison of the positions of the top universities of the base index with the matched positions of the same universities under other leading indexes including ARWU, QS, Leiden, and URAP is given. Correlations highlight the significant differences among some indexes even in measuring the same criterion such as teaching or research.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is measuring the knowledge creation of universities possible?: A review of university rankings

Olcay

Bulu

2017

Technological Forecasting and Social Change

124

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“…Desde que el semanario norteamericano US News and World Report publicó el primer ejercicio de este tipo en 1983, esta práctica, conocida en el mundo anglosajón por el término de ranking, ha adquirido una importancia creciente en un gran número de países (por ejemplo Bélanger y Davidson, 1997;Berghoff y otros, 2003;Dill y Soo, 2004;Eccles, 2002;Morse, 2001;Vaughn, 2002). Hoy en día, la influencia de los rankings anuales es tal que los establecimientos se deben casi por completo a la obligación de estar por encima de sus competidores directos, sean reales o percibidos como tales, en los diferentes criterios.…”

Section: Nuevas Tendencias En El Rol De Los Estudiantesunclassified

Nuevas tendencias en políticas de garantía de calidad en la educación superior

Perellón¹

2005

PapRevSoc

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Affaires universitaires. Rue de la Barre 8. 1014 Lausanne (Suisse) Juan-Francisco.Perellon@dfj.vd.ch tive prospects. It offers a reflection organized around three main poles: quality assurance in higher education; the relationships with the process of commercialization and the actual use of the information that be collected through the many existing instruments for quality assurance. The paper strongly argues that a decisive shift has taken place since the late1990s that as replace formative purposes of quality assurance with summative ones.

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“…Several commentators have noted the close correlation between this measure and the qualifications held by students on entry (for example, Eccles, 2002). However, this proportion can be increased both by more effective teaching and student learning, and by lowering academic standards (Dill and Soo, 2005).…”

Section: • Have a Low Students-to-staff Ratiomentioning

confidence: 99%

Conceptions of Excellence in Teaching and Learning and Implications for Future Policy and Practice

Little

Locke

2011

Questioning Excellence in Higher Education

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Within a diverse and expanding system of higher education (HE), such as in the UK, discourse on teaching and student learning highlights tensions between different notions of excellence. For example, excellence as a positional good for students, an aspirational target for continuous quality enhancement, a form of reputational advantage for HE institutions or a means of achieving governmental economic and social goals. Concepts of excellence such as these also operate differently at the level of the individual, the academic unit, the institution and an HE system. Discussion about excellence usually focuses on teaching, and there is much less attention given to excellence in student learning, or even students' perceptions of excellent teaching. The emphasis tends to be on process and form rather than content; so, what is being taught and learned has become increasingly obscured by concerns over whether teaching and learning are performed excellently.In the literature on pedagogy, there is a large body of writing that employs psychologised understandings of teaching and learning processes and which focuses on micro-level transactions between teachers and students. Though there is some conflicting evidence surrounding the idea of a hierarchy of approaches to learning and teaching -surface, deep and strategic -there seems to be consensus that excellence in pedagogy is associated with more sophisticated conceptions of learning and even, perhaps, of knowledge and its construction. However, it is clear that the dynamics of the relationship between teaching and learning are mediated by students' perceptions of their environment and by their own motivations to study: excellence in student learning may or may not require excellent teaching.Concepts of teaching excellence are linked to two other notions, viz. the scholarship of teaching and the expert teacher, with some suggestion that excellence should be an attribute of any professional teacher -perhaps confusing excellence with notions of good (enough) teaching or even 'fitness for purpose'. Much has also been written about institutional A recurring critical theme within the literature contends that the current focus on teaching (and to a lesser extent learning) excellence is symptomatic of a ubiquitous contemporary desire to measure HE performance by means of standardised criteria and quasi-scientific practices. Reinforced by the marketisation of HE and the repositioning of students as consumers, commercial publishers draw on these performance measures to compile institutional rankings, which construct broader notions of 'excellence' and 'world class' qualities in particular ways. These aggregations of available data appear to be biased towards research reputation and academic prestige, and reduce teaching 'excellence' to the numerical ratios between students and academic faculty, and learning to the results of student satisfaction surveys. The biases in favour of particular notions of 'excellence' are even more apparent in the increasingly influential world ran...

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The Use of University Rankings in the United Kingdom

Cited by 51 publications

References 2 publications

Is measuring the knowledge creation of universities possible?: A review of university rankings

Is measuring the knowledge creation of universities possible?: A review of university rankings

Nuevas tendencias en políticas de garantía de calidad en la educación superior

Conceptions of Excellence in Teaching and Learning and Implications for Future Policy and Practice

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