Many universities strive to become world-class and two of Singapore's universities are almost there, being ranked 12th and 13th in the QSWUR 2015/16. This study looked into the details of indicator rankings and found that the two universities are comparable to those in the top 10 universities in the same ranking in practically all indicators with…

World university rankings (WUR) use the weight-and-sum approach to arrive at an overall measure which is then used to rank the participating universities of the world. Although the weight-and-sum procedure seems straightforward and accords with common sense, it has hidden methodological or statistical problems which render the meaning of the…

Discrepancies between the nominal and attained indicator weights misinform rank consumers as to the relative importance of the indicators. This may lead to unwarranted institutional judgements and misdirected actions, causing resources being wasted unnecessarily. As a follow-up to two earlier studies, data from the Academic Ranking of World…