Re: Judge 2013 (Cambridge) - Calling All Applicants
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20 Nov 2012, 21:23
We generally follow herd mentality. If many people are going towards particular direction then we assume that so many people can not be wrong ... and interestingly, if they goes wrong also then I feel that I am not alone!! and my pains are then relatively manageable.
Most of the people do not have much resource to identify a good school for themselves and they blindly follow the ranking. I said blindly as many of the prospective students are clueless about the schools or what they really want to achieve from the course. Essay is rubbish or creative writing but you need to clearly identify your objective of the course and their relative priorities. Your real objective can be completely different from your essay objective!!
I come from an industry where there are 30+ BEST awards for primary business. Another 30+ for secondary business and another 100 from second tier rankers. Interestingly, the top places are predominantly taken by few companies only, historically from the last 20-30 years!!
We are from the industry and hence we know there are 60+ best awards but general public has absolutely no idea. So when one ranking ranks us as second, there is generally a negative public sentiment .... why are we second? our quality is going down the drain!! ... we completely forget that there are another 59+ awards, we forget that our competitors are almost equal to us and the difference is very thin and many a times very subjective. I remember one case where wife of one of the assessor was confused and formed a bad opinion about our company and that probably lead to a slightly lower ranking.
The issue is in ranking mechanism. Two rankings are never similar. The ranking varies as widely as from self declaration to third party audits/surveys. Oh yes, there are many rankings that just rely on your own declaration and submission. Some people are vocal and some people are conservative and many people are fake ... so technically the self declaration is absolutely rubbish. However, self declaration is the easiest ranking for the ranker and anyway, the consumer of the ranking, i.e. the general public never bother about the mechanism!! General public just look at the position ... top or not?
So to add better credibility, these rankers came up with many hybrid models, where they look at different parameters, collect submission/evidences from different channels, validate the results from various sources and then use their own algorithm to have a weighted average ranking.
So you can see, there are 1001 parameters, channels, algorithm and relative weight. One parameter important to one ranker is not at all important to another ranker. Relative weight given to one parameter is not same for two ranker ... and on top of that, ranker use different methodologies and mechanism. Student satisfaction ranks high in some rankers mind but not so high in another ranker's mind .. How do you define quality of a programme? How do you define ROI for a programme? Definitely it is not A.pple to A.pple comparison!!
If it was mathematics then, whichever way you choose, your result would have been the same ... provided you are correct. But schools are not mathematics and hence different ranking produce different results.
Having said that, ideally, BALANCED good schools should have balanced ranking everywhere, irrespective of rankers but highly skewed or unique school's ranking can fluctuate quite substantially.
The point is, ranking is important if you do not have other options to evaluate a school or most importantly, a programme. If you have other channels, then ranking is just one of the guide and you should not be to worried too much about the rankings.