NTU falls 100 spots to 174
NTU's ranking plunges in revamped Times Higher Education list
NTU's chief planning officer and registrar Chan Kwong Lok reiterated that because of the change in criteria, there was no basis of comparison between this year's and last year's rankings. -- ST PHOTO: KEVIN LIM
NANYANG Technological University (NTU) has tumbled 101 places in a revamped ranking of the world's top 200 universities.
It has plunged from 73rd to 174th place in this year's edition of the widely viewed Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings, published yesterday.
Rest of the article is hereI'm definitely alarmed. I mean, I didn't see this coming. How could anyone? I mean, I knew NTU was bad, but who knew it was this bad? If I knew that NTU was going to become the 174th best university in the world before I had a chance to graduate, I would have asked my parents harder to send me to like Australia. More fun, less stress, and the degree is worth more too!
Well, this is pretty shit because the fact that I haven't graduated when this happened means it will definitely affect my job prospects, or applications for further studies. And I would really like to ask, which university drops a 100 places in one year? It is an impossibly dismal showing, unless NTU's ranking has been inflated all along, and this inflation has been exposed for what it really is.
Well, I guess one could say that rankings aren't always objective and conspiracy theories probably abound, but I bet Dr Su is having more than a few sleepless nights wondering how he could have screwed up the university ranking so bad. I guess this is a reality check, a slap in the face after all that crowing about how NTU was the games village for YOG.
Reality check: NTU only became the games village because the cost of construction rose and it became too expensive for NUS to complete the construction of facilities on time. NTU was never the first choice for the games village. So stop crowing already.
Some academics have said that there is no basis for comparison between the rankings from last year and this year due to different measurement criteria, but apart from NTU and a clutch of other universities, most universities, especially the top ones, moved little from their previous rankings. If the criteria weren't objective, there would have been major reshuffles all round.
That didn't happen, and being a minority case it really weakens the argument for the lack of objectivity of the rankings. If anything, the measurement criteria actually became more objective, relying less on expert opinions. And if the criteria are really the case, why is NUS hardly affected?
I'm guessing its because a large part of a university's rankings is actually determined by the quality of its postgraduate research which NTU is hardly strong in, but it is the graduates like me who are going to be fall guys for the bad rankings.
This whole affair sucks because it is really tough studying in Singapore. The competition is intense because of a rigid bell curve sytem, we mug our guts out for tiny gains in GPA, and now we watch all that potentially go to waste because of something beyond our control.
And I had to pay school fees during my internship when I wasn't even attending classes in this stupid school. Does that make any sense to anyone?
I'd like to demand lower school fees now. I shouldn't be paying first class fees for a third class education.