Three years after IITs boycott Times Higher Education varsity ranking, agency tweaks criteria

In 2020, IITs had boycotted the THE World University Rankings over issues of 'transparency' after none of them were ranked among the world's top 300 institutions

Years after Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) boycotted the Times Higher Education (THE) World University, the agency behind the list has said that they have introduced specific changes to address the former's concerns.

In 2020, IITs in Mumbai, Delhi, Bombay, Madras, Kanpur, Roorkee and Kharagpur had boycotted the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings over issues of “transparency” after none of them were ranked among the world's top 300 institutions the previous year.

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Now, as per an Indian Express report, the UK-based ranking agency is attempting to bring them back on board. The agency reportedly approached the premier engineering schools in March to tell them about specific changes in the performance parameters introduced to address their concerns.

On March 7, Times Higher Education (THE) representatives delivered a presentation at IIT-Delhi, IIT-Bombay, and IIT-Madras.

As per the report, the representatives listed revisions to the ranking criteria during the presentation, including adjustments to the citation measure, which the IITs had previously criticised.

Previously, the citation statistic, which assesses the average number of times a university's published work is cited by researchers worldwide, was weighted at 30 per cent. It has now been cut in half, to 15 per cent.

Aside from this, THE has introduced three additional indicators that account for 15 per cent of the total — typical research strength (5 per cent), brilliance in research (5 per cent) and the network effect of citations (5 per cent). The three new parameters compensate for the decrease in the citation metric.

These changes, THE noted, would address IITs’ concern over “high ranking positions for very small, relatively unknown Indian Institutions, with high volatility of positions from one year to the next for some institution.”