THES World University Rankings (2005)

130??! Bath is 130?! How can it be 130 in the world rankings but 10th in the Sunday Times ranking?! These tables make no sense, they're all a load of rubbish.

It can be 130th in the world because there are other Universities in the world aside from ones over here.... also, you really can't dispute most of the British ones that are higher than Bath on that list.

Stop this denial. You're ranking these schools against the world.
I am surprised, though, to see Natl Univ Singapore at 22.

I was suprised to see Manchester beat Durham/Nottingham/Warwick/Bristol/York/KCL, but it's probably something to do with reputation and large faculty size.

me too. seems a bit too high up on the table?

Here is the Top100 ranking.

1 1 Harvard University
2 3 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
3 6 Cambridge University
4 5 Oxford University

Currently, I'm studying at Oxford. But I did recieve offers from MIT, which I rejected.

It can be 130th in the world because there are other Universities in the world aside from ones over here.... also, you really can't dispute most of the British ones that are higher than Bath on that list.

Edit: I just re-read the original post and realised how badly it must have come across! I didn't mean it like "how dare they put Bath in 130th place!", I just can't believe the inconsistencies between these tables and how misleading they could be to someone applying to university. Its beyond a joke

Irked that some parvenus in a supposed–Third World nation had deigned to pass judgement on the First World, the well-respected The Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) in the United Kingdom came up with its own Top 200 list of the world's best universities in November 2004; together with some sniffy commentary on the ostensible defects of the SJTU ratings. They repeated the exercise in November 2005.

The THES ranks the Australian universities much higher than SJTU. We are more than dubious. The 2005 THES ratings places two Australian universities as better than every single university in Europe, save two; as better than every university in Japan save one; as better than UCSD, Cornell, UCLA, the Ecole Polytechnique, Kyoto and Johns Hopkins.

That is crap: pure and simple. THES can't even get the names of the universities correct. It's not ‘Tasmania University’ but the ‘University of Tasmania’, for example. We found six Aussie misnamings like this. Silly pedantic issue? Perhaps, but if they cannot even get the name right, why should we expect they have their calculations right?

We think that the toffs at THES have some very serious rethinking to do. We also suggest that those academics {professors} at those two Aussie universities who are ecstatic at the THES ratings release their grip from their genitalia and apply it to reality instead.

Seriously though, league tables are all a pile of rubbish.

From a google search I've come across the following criticism about THES in a website and so felt like posting it here for getting your personal opinions. Source: http://www.archsoc.com/kcas/bestunis.html

That 'critique' is quite embaressing.

From a google search I've come across the following criticism about THES in a website and so felt like posting it here for getting your personal opinions. Source: http://www.archsoc.com/kcas/bestunis.html

I just noticed that THES rankings often used the format of "XXX University," even though some universities would prefer a different format/word order. For example, it used "Cambridge University" and "Oxford University" rather than "University of Cambridge" and "University of Oxford."