Our Rightful Place in Top 50, Lagging Due to 'Perception', Former IIT Delhi Director on QS Ranking

Even as 41 Indian institutes have been featured in the latest QS Ranking, only three have made it to the top 200 and none in the top 50, however, former IIT Delhi director V Ramgopal Rao claims that institutes like IIT Delhi have their “rightful place” among top 50. The reason behind the Indian institutes lacking in the ranking index is because of the ‘perception’ index.

Describing the six parameters on which QS ranks institutes include academic reputation from global survey, which holds highest weightage of 40 per cent, employer reputation from global survey with 10 per cent weightage. The faculty-student ratio and the citation per faculty Scopus have 20 per cent weightage each. The remaining 10 per cent weightage is equally distributed among ‘proportion of international students’ and ‘proportion of international faculty’.

Read | IISc Best Indian University, DU, JNU, Jamia, Hyderabad Uni Fall From Spot: QS Ranking

Stating that 50 per cent of weightage includes reputation matrix, the professor said perception is a “totally subjective metric” as “who you ask decided where you are ranked.” He further stated, “we need to improve our perception. Indian institutions are scoring very poorly here.”

He further added, “Among all parameters, citations per faculty is most definitive parameter and is taken from trusted databases. That’s where Indian institutions excel right now with IISc being on top. On this metric, most of our top intuitions are among the top 100.”

“So if (we) are faring poorly in these ranging’s, its not because our top institutions are not research intensive or poor in quality. It’s because of perception and lack of international footprint.” he said in a social media post.

In the QS World University Rankings 2023 edition released on Wednesday, IIT Delhi featured amongst the top-200 world institutions with an improved rank of 174 amongst 1422 globally ranked institutes. IIT Delhi has shown an improved performance with an overall score of 46.5 in QS WUR 2023 from its last year’s score of 45.9 overall. A noteworthy improvement was shown in the perception metrics as well with a score of 49 in Academic Reputation (45.8 last year) and Employer reputation 79.2 (70.8 last year). The rank in Academic Reputation and Employer Reputation improved by 12 and 23 positions respectively from the previous year.

Suggesting measures for other institutes as well as IIT Delhi to improve ranking in perception matrix, the former director said, “our top institutions going global and developing an international footprint is the surest and fastest way to reach our rightful place in these world rankings. That we need to do, without compromising on our other quality metrics.”

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