yjblog

Oh no. Not even two months after my rant over how the Times Higher Education Supplement (link) ranked the National University of Singapore (NUS) in the top 20 varsities worldwide (according to them, anyway), and now the Straits Times reports the following:

NUS in world top 10 in IT and engineering [straitstimes.com.sg; free but nonetheless annoying registration required]

Since the article expires in a few days, I’ll just summarise what irks me about this article: the title of the article reads “NUS in world top 10 in IT and engineering,” and the tagline goes “It beats premier varsities like Harvard in global survey of faculty.”

Harvard?! In engineering?! How desperate a comparison do you need? Edit, after seeing the rankings: Granted, Harvard was ranked 14th or thereabouts, but that seems to be more an effect of the “score normalisation” than anything (the rankings are based on a normalisation of the “impact of published papers,” whatever that means). The university, while extremely distinguished, has a combined engineering and applied sciences division with five departments — is that what you want to compare your humongoid “Faculty of Engineering” to?

Yes, I fully understand that, in the local media, being ranked globally in some measure of excellence is invariably newsworthy… but this isn’t reporting, it’s mindless cheerleading. Ra-ra Singapura.

I mean, what next — “NUS beats world-class varsities like MIT in English Literature?”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 21st, 2004 at 9:47 pm and is filed under Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.