academic assessment

Academic rankings

I do not like academic rankings. Academic Rankings Considered Harmful! clearly summarises ideas I believe in: “An academic decision is typically a multi-objective optimization problem, in which the objective function is highly personal. A unidimensional ranking provides a seductively easy objective function to optimize. Yet such decision making ignores the complex interplay between individual preferences and programs’ unique patterns of strengths and weaknesses. Decision making by ranking is decision making by lazy minds, I believe”.