U-Multirank works to improve quality of indicators

By Carmen Paun, University World News

The consortium running the European Commission-backed U-Multirank is working to ensure the quality and reliability of the indicators it will use to measure universities, University World News has been told in an exclusive interview.

Jordi Curell, director of higher education and international affairs in the commission’s directorate general for education and culture, said assessments were weakened by universities failing to monitor the professional success of their graduates.

“There is an issue because some of the indicators are difficult to obtain, for instance when it comes to the tracking of students, because they don’t exist everywhere,” he said of the new global ranking system that was officially launched in Dublin in January.

U-Multirank aims to step out from the crowd of international university rankings by focusing not only on institutions’ research quality, as other rankings largely do, but also measuring teaching and learning, knowledge transfer, and the international orientation and regional engagement of participating universities.

Some of these, such as the quality of teaching, are more difficult to measure, admitted Curell. “That’s done in particular through student surveys, but also in terms of completion rates, dropouts,” he explained to University World News.

Check:
http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20130510164443151

Povl Tiedemann
May 2013