(4 Jul 2023) In an unprecedented move, all of South Korea’s top research universities have come together in a call to boycott global university rankings issued by QS, saying the United Kingdom-based ranking organization has not heeded their claim that changes made to the rankings this year are not transparent and contain “mathematical flaws”.
The 52 universities in South Korea united in setting up the University Rankings Forum of Korea (URFK) last month in a concerted action against methodology changes in the QS World University Rankings released at the end of June.
All Korean universities except one experienced a drop in the QS ranking this year, as did a number of well-known Japanese universities, such as Tokyo Institute of Technology, universities in Hong Kong and some in Taiwan.
They believe this was due to changes relating, in particular, to QS’ International Research Network (IRN) indicator, newly added this year, which the group says is unreasonable for non-English speaking countries. Australian universities rose this year on this indicator.
University World News has the news in full.
