In response to global competition in higher education, university rankings have been developed. These have been interpreted as indicating the regions and countries with the most prestigious and competitive higher education institutions. The rankings are viewed as important in many countries, but their role is ambiguous and contested in the Nordic…

The purpose of large-scale international assessments is to compare educational achievement across countries. For such cross-national comparisons to be meaningful, the participating students must be representative of the target population. In this paper, we consider whether this is the case for Canada, a country widely recognised as high performing…