Rankings issue arose from error

Star: PETALING JAYA: The good news is that two Malaysian universities did not really drop significantly in the world university rankings.
But the bad news is that Universiti Malaya (UM) and Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) should never have been ranked so high to start with.
Their misleading positions last year in the World University Rankings were due to a case of “mistaken identity”.
Chinese and Indians at the public universities were wrongly categorised as foreign students, which resulted in UM and USM doing well in this ranking criterion.
The mistake in their international enrolment was, however, rectified this year, resulting in a drastic drop in the latest rankings.
UM and USM made it to 89th and 111th spot, respectively, last year but fell sharply this year, raising concerns of a drop in standards at the universities.
UM plunged to 169th position while USM dropped out of the top 200 universities.
Nunzio Quacquarelli, managing director of QS Quacquarelli Symonds which compiled the rankings, clarified that the mistake occurred because they were not aware of Malaysia’s racial composition.
“Last year, the Chinese and Indian students were classified as foreign nationals; this resulted in Malaysia getting very high marks under the international students category.
“However, once the marks were adjusted this year, there was a big change of position for both universities,” he said here yesterday.
Quacquarelli said that despite the sharp fall in its overall position, UM had improved tremendously.
“If you look at peer review, which accounts for 40% of the marks, UM rose 41 places to 80.”
UM was placed among the top 100 universities in three out of five categories – Arts and Humanities (45th place), Biomedicine (82nd) and Social Science (83rd). The other two categories are Science and Technology.
He said QS came up with the rankings, which are published in The Times Higher Education Supplement (THES), to provide information to prospective students so that they would be able to make more informed decisions.