10 October 2008

ANU still number 1?

| johnboy
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The Canberra Times reports that ANU has rated 16th in the world and is, according to the Times Higher Education world rankings the finest university outside of the US and Britain.

So Rioters… Does this match with your own experiences of ANU and other seats of higher learning?

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I got degrees from both UC and ANU – I found both to be quite good. The ANU degree has been worth more as an investment. I enjoyed the educational experience at ANU, I think research led education is a little richer (but it still comes down to the individuals)

RuffnReady said :

Pseudo beat me to it by 15 minutes… I find it ironic that people ask “what is it based on?” when we are talking about university ranking – didn’t they teach you how to research? I have a link here to the actual rankings, not a story about the rankings, so go there and click on “methodology”:

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/hybrid.asp?typeCode=142&pubCode=1&navcode=118

Did any of you read the methodology? Well I did and by the way, I’m a statistician. First and foremost I can tell you that the THES rankings are severely flawed. Why? Because they asked 200,000 academics to respond to their survey and the response rate? Well less 1%. Considering there are thousands of universities around the world – who’s to say that these few academics have the knowledge to rate universities around the world and across disciplines.

In regards to publication the metodology makes no reference to how the sampling was approached and how they managed to deal with universities from non-English speaking countries that don’t publish research in English. A scan of the list shows that many top European universities were withe ranked poorly or didn’t make the list.

Other flaws? The 2008 rankings changed to using z-scores which is problematic because the sampling distribution was NOT NORMAL considering the sample response rate. Hence the volatility in the rankings from year to year. In fact it wouldn’t be surprising if you find that the universties towards the bottom of the list ranked below 180 got only 1 or 2 votes. That is, they made the list not because they are elite, but just because one of the 2000 respondents surveyed happended to list them in their top 30.

In 2008 the ANU was ranked above UC Berkeley, Stanford, McGill, The University of Michigan, UCLA and The University of Tokyo. Very well done but you have to be absent minded not to find that peculiar.

As for Nobel Prizes – this is problematic because many Nobel Prize winners affiliated with a university usually didn’t conduct their ground breaking research there.

Employer review score – the methodology is so vague about this and doesn’t even state which so ‘called’ employers were asked to rate the universities. And who within various companies would have the right credentials to rate students across universities. There’s simply no validity in the method.

Berkeley ran an interesting article a while back. Did you guys know that the THES rankings are actually a marketing gimmick to make the magazine money? All the universities that are listed in the rankings are contacted and asked to purchase publication and media “packs” costing up to $40,000 so they can have their university listed in media publications and world university directories that the company produces.

Research and science (both of which the ANU claims strengths in) is based on TRUTH and QUESTIONING the validity of your sources through investigation. Since the ANU publicly endorses the THES rankings you really need to question the integrity of the university and whether it’s as great as it puts it out to be.

Why is all this problematic? Well economically it paints a picture that Australian universities are prosperous and world class research powerhouses when in fact they are severely lacking in funding and research grants.

One area that the THES fails to take into account the SELECTIVITY. That is does the university attract the best students in the country and the world as indicated by how selective it is?

RuffnReady said :

My experience of science at the ANU (chemistry, biology, ecology, human ecology) over a decade is that the lecturers are mostly excellent and often highly reputed globally in their field, the resources are abundant, and the class sizes are small. Really, you couldn’t ask for much more.

Agreed
(Except i’m doing SRES, geology, psychology, and computer science courses)

and CiT offer degrees in photography and other design courses. http://www.cit.act.edu.au/future/courses/photography_advanced_diploma_bachelor_design/

so no, they are not ‘breaking the law’ r’n’r – they go to extraordinary lengths to pass through a long and complex process of ed. board review to have a course certified to ‘degree’ level.

Overheard definitely the best advice to anyone is take a year off after Year 12 and decide for sure. Our chemistry teacher at high school used to bemoan the fact that the highest rate of dropouts at uni were private school kids who went straight from year 12 to uni. I had a year off before joining up and it was the best thing for me. I happily pass that advice on to anyone considering uni.

Which TAFEs offer degrees? The highest qualification a TAFE can offer is an advanced diploma. If a TAFE is offering a degree level course they are breaking the law.

Some decent commentary here on ANU’s shortcomings – it is a highly academic institution, so expect to come out with excellent research, analysis and writing skills, a solid grounding in the theory, and not much else. CU and CIT are far more towards the practical application end of things. Choose which of those aspects you need to get where you want to go, and go from there.

Overheard said: “Please, please, please do NOT follow the Overheard practice: finish Year 12, look at your score sheet, say ‘Economics’ is your best score, so I’ll take Economics with a side of statistics and (what was I thinking) mathematics”

Ugh, my pet hate. And yet so many parents and so-called school careers counsellors push people that way. TER-shopping. Or whatever your tertiary entrance score is called these days.

People look at their TER/UAI mark, and then see what that’ll get them into. What a crazy way of making a decision! The TER/UAI cutoff for uni courses is an indicator of the course’s popularity (unless the uni has decided to artificially inflate it, to keep those out who aren’t going to be able to pass it).

If a course has 30 spots, then the applicants for the course are lined up in order of UAI. The UAI of the 30th applicant is the cutoff. It’s that simple.

For years, the course with the highest TER/UAI cutoff in the ACT was… sports journalism at the UC. Because it was incredibly difficult and prestigious? No! Becuase it was popular!

We had a much better higher ed system in the days before Dawkins wrecked it. UC was a really good training institution, ANU was a really good research-orientated educational institution, which is what universities used to be.

Now we have a jumble of assorted higher ed institutions, many of which are still training colleges but which now have to waste their time jumping through hoops to pretend to be universities. And universities have to pretend to be voc ed institutions. And TAFEs offer degrees? It’s getting very silly.

Before Dawkins, you knew exactly what you were getting. If you went to ANU or the university of Sydney, you were going to get an education, and maybe discover something new. If you went to CCAE or Mitchell CAE, you were going to be well trained in a vocation you’d chosen.

The Dawkins “reform” didn’t improve anything, and we lost many valuable institutions, and introduced confusion and disappointment into our higher ed system.

It was later compounded by the “every child wins a prize” policy which had vast armies of c-grade scholars being herded into universities. And both debacles were perpetrated by, I’m sorry to say, Labor governments.

Sleaz274, I salute (no pun intended) your choice to resist being an accountant.

Q. What do accountants use for contraception?
A. Their personalities.

And I have about 87 more on topic. My father was an accountant… actually, no, he TAUGHT accountancy but would have to accept barter when he helped someone with their taxes as he was qualified as a teacher not as a CPA. So a farmer friend used to give us two large, live turkeys every year when Dad did his tax in lieu of payment. Mmmmmm. Roast turkey. Mum had to carve one in half one year (after it had gone to meet its maker) because it wouldn’t fit in the oven.

Did I mention I’m going to return to vegetarian status one day?

ADFA — no doubt it’s a wonderful educational institution but to be around so many buzz-cuts would make my flesh crawl. (Metaphorically-speaking, that is. Thanks to the wonderful Len’s in Puckle Street, Moonee Ponds I now look like a cordie myself, but to be around so many other military types in one confined space is not good for one’s health or wellbeing. There are warnings on the entrance gates something akin to warnings on packets of cigarettes.)

If any young’uns (or old’uns) out there are contemplating making the leap into tertiary ed, can I please urge you to learn from this fat, old bastard’s mistakes: think very seriously about what you want to do. Go to a vocational guidance counsellor. Check out every potential institution. Consider interstate, overseas, another planet for what you might want to do and where you do it.

Hell, take 12 months to decide while you drive taxis or wait tables or be Tess Ryan’s apprentice while you scope out your options.

Please, please, please do NOT follow the Overheard practice: finish Year 12, look at your score sheet, say ‘Economics’ is your best score, so I’ll take Economics with a side of statistics and (what was I thinking) mathematics. I had to defer in October as I wound up in hospital on an unrelated matter (though I think the educational choice didn’t help), but I never went back.

Nine years later I started a professional writing degree (thank you, thank you, thank you to my darling ex-wife for kicking me up the ar$e for long enough to actually cross the threshold at UC to start it, though ultimately to change specialisations). Ironically (maybe), I’m now gravitating slowly towards her chosen (but not completed) field of environmental sciences.

But moreover, I get to self-actualise (that’s from the Prosaic term meaning ‘masturbation without all the sticky consequences’) in my company job, and I have more than enough fuel to do 26 other things, many of them paid.

OK, I’m finishing this rather fine Polish beer (Okocim — 7% !!) and going to bed.

Nighty night. And then, as with every one I greet, eht’s goan ter be a greeeaat day!

I started at ANU this semester doing a post grad cert in financial management and it has been woeful. I went to CIT last semester doing accounting (and then decided I definitely didn’t want to be an accountant) and it was far more practical, hands on and the lecturers were much better. My biggest gripe so far has been a financial statistics course that has had absolutely zero and I mean zero finance at all. It is basically a masters course in hard core statistics and I can safely say the worst spent $2500 of my life. To top it off its considered a “core” subject to complete the certfication. All up this semester has cost me 40 odd hours of leave from work, $5000 and a complete killing of my motivation to even bother continuing next year.

I attended ADFA which is of course run on the academic side by UNSW and I can safely say it was a fantastic university with excellent lecturers who seemed generally interested in teaching the next “officer class” of the military and the young minds attached.

While I’m on my rant I’ll reveal my racist streak and say that the ANU isn’t the Australian National University at all its the A$ian National Univer$ity, 95% of both my classes are either Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese or Indians and at the prices those poor suckers are paying without government assistance I would be truly annoyed and contemplating a short yet spectacular career with the Taliban.

At this point I’m so over it and de-motivated that I’m considering just ditching the subjects altogether taking the $5k hit, lesson well learnt, move on soldier.

lula said :

I can only speak as a graduate of the ANU School of Art, but so far as that goes it is definitely among the world’s best.
Great facilities, great lecturers and mentors, an amazing course. Not too mention in that beautiful old building where you can feel like you really are part of some greater tradition.
Speaking of, next year Cambridge celebrates it’s 800th anniversary. Crazy! How do you compare yourself to that!?

Nice words, lula, and good on you for giving credit where it’s due.

To whit, I hear what you’re saying about comparisons of history, but I still think newer institutions can be bright and brilliant and that’s a mark of the management and the staff. I might have mentioned on another thread a Comms tutor of mine out at UC who used to hold the most inspiring 50 min tutes, the sort you regretted having to wind up and leave. We were still having debates and conversations on the way out the door while the next mob were trying to get in.

I can only speak as a graduate of the ANU School of Art, but so far as that goes it is definitely among the world’s best.
Great facilities, great lecturers and mentors, an amazing course. Not too mention in that beautiful old building where you can feel like you really are part of some greater tradition.
Speaking of, next year Cambridge celebrates it’s 800th anniversary. Crazy! How do you compare yourself to that!?

As others have mentioned, its varies, a lot. The universities high international rating is largely a result of postgraduate studies and a few specific undergraduate area’s. For the average undergraduate student, none of this is important, as they will not experience much outside of their faculty.

Science and economics are areas I believe ANU performs quite well in, contrasting this would be Engineering and Computer Science. ANU Engineering is currently rated 6th of the group of 8 universities, and personally I believe that they are more realistically equal last. Engineering students will find themselves with the lowest teaching space per student, lowest computing resources (1 computer per ~25 students), lowest department funding per student (70-75% of engineering student course fees are siphoned into other university areas), and generally incompetent lecturers with little oversight.

As I said it depends on what you are studying, and whether that is seen as important by the university.

I would be amazed if the claim that in general lecturers teach only one class / don’t also perform their own research is true anywhere within any university in Australia.

I-filed said :

CCAE is NOT a real university… it’s a vocational college.

Fair-ish sort of comment sort of kind of maybe not so. There’s relevance in what ‘CCAE’ stands for (which many here may not be aware of — Canberra College of Advanced Eduction, for the kiddies).

However, I don’t see the point of invoking a name from 20, 25 (more?) years ago without mentioning the fact that many educational institutions of many different hues were all knighted (bow down, Citizen CCAE, arise Dame UC) and became Unis.

I spent all of nine months at ANU and found it frustratingly academic (yeah, der, but I struggled for any practical application in what I was doing: Economics — involuntary shudder). Nine years later, I fronted up to Uni of Canberra and loved the vocational nature of a degree that took forever part-time, but I started using it from day one, even though over eight years after graduating, I haven’t actually stepped foot in a traditional job where one would say, ‘Aha, of course, he’s a Bachelor of Arts in Communication (spec. Organisational Communication)’. Business Analyst (on the business card, Payroll Systems consultant, team leader, manager, assistant director — forget what my title’s been for the last 10 days — I think getting a business card made up might be presumptuous and in some ways, defeatist.

It helps in all those roles and many more, but whether it’s worthy of seven and a half years on and off of part-time study, hmmmm.

I tell you, though, it even comes in handy working at can bars (cider on tap) at folk festivals even. True. (Eek (no pun intended) — reminds me of another post to come…)

well of course i knew the criteria – it was the “the number of prominent (e.g. nobel prize winning) staff” bit that i was critiquing – FRSs hardly grow on trees and are about the next tuier down from a nobel laureate. one of the FRSs to have been ‘persuaded’ to take his centre elsewhere was awarded the marconi prize, which is considered the equivalent of the nobel for telecommunications and associated science – which the founders of google won a couple years back, and which tim berners-lee also won – hardly low-rent!

and it isn’t like these FRSs were at the non-productive ends of their careers… seems the ranking system biases quantity over quality to some extent.

i don’t disregard ANU’s excellence, i wonder though that in context if it really should be ranked more highly than stanford, berkeley & carnegie mellon?? not to mention paris’ ecole…

still, i suppose that, as an alumni, i shouldn’t complain..!

CCAE is NOT a real university… it’s a vocational college.

I have a bit of experience in a few areas at the ANU and in my experience, compared to other unis around the world, ANU is drastically overrated at least in regard to the student experience. Brilliant researchers doing good things, that’s for sure, but for at least a few departments I would recommend students go elsewhere. Anywhere elsewhere, but elsewhere.

I’ve heard in addition that the ouput from the John Curtin Medical School really pumps up the ANUs international ratings. Can’t speak to that, but it’s grist for the mill.

Pseudo beat me to it by 15 minutes… I find it ironic that people ask “what is it based on?” when we are talking about university ranking – didn’t they teach you how to research? I have a link here to the actual rankings, not a story about the rankings, so go there and click on “methodology”:

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/hybrid.asp?typeCode=142&pubCode=1&navcode=118

My experience of science at the ANU (chemistry, biology, ecology, human ecology) over a decade is that the lecturers are mostly excellent and often highly reputed globally in their field, the resources are abundant, and the class sizes are small. Really, you couldn’t ask for much more.

astrojax said :

i just wonder what criteria is used to rank these unis.

Look it up. The Times HES, Jiao Tong & Melbourne uni rankings are all based on published criteria, which are all university wide and research-heavy. In varying proportions, they include the number and impact of publications from staff, the number of prominent (e.g. nobel prize winning) staff, value of competitive funding awarded, community views from prominent employers and academics, and, occasionally, undergraduate student views or results.

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=400069

ANU consistently tops all three:

http://www.australian-universities.com/rankings/

You get the benefit of lecturers only teaching one course a semester, rather than two or three. At the later year undergraduate level, you get the benefit of lecturers who are actively involved in research in the areas they are teaching. This means you generally get teaching staff whose knowledge is current and are enthusiastic.

Compared with other top tier Australian unis, you don’t get particularly large faculties in some areas which limits the diversity of what can be taught, nor the large student cohorts which permit economies of scale in teaching.

It depends on what you are looking for, either as a student or an assessor. There is a fundamental dichotomy as to the purpose of universities; to teach or to produce knowledge? Bear in mind that all three major rankings focus on the latter and the former can be dependent on quite subjective views of what constitutes ‘good’ teaching.

As former student and employee in economics I can say that the economics department is the best in the country, and on par with the better North American institutions.

It is dribs and drabs across other parts of the university. Most of science is excellent, but humanities you can expect the usual gaggle of mediocre Marxists and femmos you would find in any other university.

These rankings are usually based upon research publications.

i just wonder what criteria is used to rank these unis. i would have thought policies that cause, in one year alone, at least three fellows of the royal society to leave, rather than trying to attract this calibre of staff, would set it back a little..?

that said, while it is a pretty good uni, there are surely a dozen or more unis in the US alone that would outrank it? then there’s europe – i sense some sort of geo-parity politics at play in this list.

Because ANU is so big it has a great deal of diversity in teaching and research quality. And even more diversity in student opinions on this quality.

Based on my experience, the commerce department is risible and is really not much more than a sifting mechanism for the big accounting firms. Grads probably learn much more on the job than they do at uni there.

The faculty of Asian studies and faculty of arts are much better – lecturers and tutors are more enthusiastic and, dare I say it, even more learned than their commerce colleagues.

I have not studied elsewhere in Australia so have no grounds for comparison with other unis, but for most subjects, I’m sure you could do a lot worse than ANU.

ANU seems to be a good brand to bandy around when looking for a job.

But that is my own experience, and I’m sure the haterz have much to say.

ANU is good for research.

Pretty ordinary for undergraduate degrees. Huge class sizes, lack of attention from lecturers etc.

I didn’t feel particularly lucky to be there. It just gave me the opportunity to mock my fiancee for going to UC.

Then of course when I switched to UC, my friends all had the opportunity to mock me.

To be honest, I found UC (for my purposes) to be the better uni. I think you have to get up into the high postgraduate level to get the real benefits of ANU.

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