After as many as 6 IITs boycotted its global rankings for a second consecutive year, Times Higher Education (THE) said it will tweak its performance grading methodology to address issues of the Indian Institutes of Technology. In 2020, IIT Delhi, Bombay, Guwahati, Madras, Roorkee, Kanpur and Kharagpur had refused to participate in the rankings stating “transparency in their ranking process”. IIT Guwahati, however, participated in the rankings this year.
“After dialogue in 2019, we have engaged in constant public debate ensuring that they have been kept updated on the progress with WUR 3.0 methodology and we ran a special webinar session on this with IIT’s last year in 2021. We also covered this again in the India Forum earlier this year in February 2022 on our future plans to tweak the methodology, to take into account the IIT’s concerns, and to explore the implications of our methodological change,” Ritin Malhotra, THE’s Regional Director of the South Asian Region told ThePrint.
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After the last rankings when IIT Delhi participated, former director, V Ramgopal Rao, had said he is not happy with the performance. “Our top institutions in India can be among the top 50 in any of the World University Rankings,” he said while highlighting several loopholes in the matrix of international ranking agencies. Half of the points are based on reputation. Of the total, 40 per cent weightage is given to academic reputation and 10 per cent to employer reputation.
IITs also consistently rank low in the foreign enrolments of teachers and students category. “IIT jobs are government jobs. Recruiting international faculty is still riddled with policy issues at all levels,” said Rao. Due to the EWS quota implementation, 2500 additional students have been admitted in the last two years, said Rao, however, finding “quality faculty” corresponding to these students is a slow process, he informed.
Last year while announcing the NIRF ranking, the Education Minister had said that he does not agree with the global rankings as he believed they give too much weightage to the ‘perspective’ matrix.
Not just international rankings, Rao had also suggested a parallel international NIRF ranking should be created that compares India’s top 50 institutions to the world’s top 50 institutions, he said adding that he believes this will set higher goals for educational institutions in India. “Time has come to create new goal posts now. Otherwise, it will be a sort of musical chairs at the top and will be a zero-sum game for the country,” he said.
THE World University Rankings 2022 released recently saw the Indian institute of Science as highest ranking Indian institute in the 301-399 bracket. A total of 75 education institutes from India had participated in the rankings this year. A total of 7 IITs made it to the list including IIT Ropar (501-600), IIT Indore (601-800), IIT Gandhinagar ((801-1000), IIT Patna (801-1000), IIT Bhubaneswar (1001-1200), IIT Guwahati (1001-1200), and IIT Mandi (1001-1200).
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