NEW APPROACH FOR MEASURING ACADEMIC TEACHING EXCELLENCE IN UNIVERSITY RANKINGS

Global ranking has importance to countries, governments, universities, and students. Countries restructure higher education systems and enhance competitiveness at the global step. Governments pay closer attention and utilize rankings to make policy decisions. Global Rankings help to improve universities based on the indicators considered in the ranking system. In addition, most of the international students decide where to study based on the university rankings and subject rankings. University functions (e.g. teaching, research, and social services) are directly related to global competitiveness. Global university ranking judges world class universities across several indicators. Also, university ranking can be considered as one of the measurements of universities global competitiveness. Now ranking is used as reputation race among universities and countries. The global universities rankings are QS World University Rankings, Times Higher Education World University Rankings, Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), and World’s Best Universities Ranking – US News & World Report. Each one of them uses different methodology to measure teaching academic excellence, research productivity, and impact. The objective of this paper is to review and compare different methodologies and develop a new approach for measuring academic teaching excellence for universities rankings. Also, the paper considers the limitations associated with these rankings. Most of the ranking criteria are over emphasizing on research and academic excellence measured mainly by qualitative surveys. Generally, university research performance is reflected more accurately than teaching by global university rankings. For example, ARWU ranking is mostly based on research indicators. ARWU measures the quality of education by the number of winners of Nobel Prize among the university’s graduates, which is indirect way. Furthermore, measuring the quality of teaching by the staff/student ratios is also indirect way. In addition to rankings’ indictors, there are some factors affect universities rankings, such as difficulties to measure academic quality, geographic distribution of universities, and high income countries.