Class Exercise 4

Task: Look through the World University Rankings data, and suggest a few questions you like your reader to think about.

The 2012 QS World University Rankings report can be found here.

Snapshot of  2012 QS World University Rankings (Top 12 Overall)

There are a lot of information presented in the 2012 QS World University Rankings. The universities can be sorted based on broad categories such as country, classification, academic reputation, employer reputation, faculty student, citations per faculty, international faculty, international students and overall score. Readers can look at the data based on simple sorting as such, or looked deeper by asking questions on why the data is as such.

For the simple sorting technique, readers might want to compare how the universities in a certain countries fair. For example, they can choose to see only the universities in Singapore and Malaysia. Such selection will be useful if the reader have the intention to go into a university based on those countries. Readers can then for example compare the openness of the university to international students or even compare the academic reputation or the universities. Simple sorting will thus give readers answers to questions such as "Which university has a higher proportion of international students?" and "Which university has a higher academic reputation?".

Snapshot of 2012 QS World University Rankings (Singapore & Malaysia)

Readers can also question why certain data is as such. For example, universities in Japan has a notably low proportion of international students, regardless of overall ranking. Why is that so? Readers probably have to look at the social and political openness of Japan to find out for the answer.

Snapshot of 2012 QS World University Rankings (Japan)

There are many other questions that can be asked by readers. Back to the first snapshot that shows the 12 top universities in the world, why is it that the top universities are located in America and United Kingdom? Is there relation between the age of the university and its ranking? Is research strength crucial in the overall ranking of the universities? The questions that can be asked based on the given data alone is of course not exhaustive.