By Amelia Tan

A NEW ranking of Asian universities that has the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 10th place has raised eyebrows among academics here.

They are questioning how Quacquarelli Symonds Ltd (QS), the compilers of the Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings, gave NUS such a low ranking.

The university was placed fourth in Asia in a worldwide survey done last year - by the same company. It was listed as No. 30 globally in that ranking.

However, in QS.com's latest ranking of varsities in Asia, schools in Hong Kong took three of the top four spots, ahead of the University of Tokyo (Todai), a perennial regional powerhouse.

The Nanyang Technological University was placed 14th - it finished 12th in Asia in the worldwide survey last year. The Singapore Management University was unplaced. (See box)

QS head of research Ben Sowters said the reason NUS dropped down the charts is that new criteria reflecting Asian contexts were used to calculate the rankings.

For example, he said, many Asian university faculty members lose out on the citations per faculty criterion, which is used in the world university rankings.

This is because many write and publish research papers in their local language and are therefore not cited as often in international journals, which are mostly in English.

To reflect this, the new criteria of papers per faculty and citations per paper, which measure both productivity and quality, were introduced.

But NUS president Tan Chorh Chuan said the university is still trying to understand how its 10th-placed ranking was derived.

'Clearly, survey methodologies will affect the rankings of individual universities, but for NUS, all other indicators show that we are indeed a leading global university centred in Asia,' he said.

In total, nine categories were measured: Asian academic peer review, papers per faculty, citations per paper, student-faculty ratio, Asian employer review, international faculty, international students, inbound exchange students and outbound exchange students.

NUS received perfect scores in five categories: peer review, recruiter review, papers per faculty and international faculty and international students. However, it lost out in the faculty-to-student ratio.

Professor Simon Marginson, an authority on higher education at Melbourne University, also expressed surprise at the rankings.

He said: 'This is great for Hong Kong, which does have an excellent university system, but even the strongest supporter of universities in the island would not claim this kind of primacy over Singapore and Japan.'

He added: 'NUS is respected throughout the higher education world. It is emerging as the most globally effective university in Asia and has very strong and improving performance on research, as well as an advanced model of teaching and internationalisation.'

Prof Marginson said he did not consider QS's methods for data collection 'sound' - for example, academics are surveyed on their views of the universities - and therefore does not see it as an important ranking.

'Reputational surveys are notoriously poor research instruments. Studies show that most respondents usually know only their own university, and perhaps the one where they did their PhD,' he said.

'I don't think NUS has reason to think its performance has declined. Different rankings produce different results and some are more sound than others.'

NTU, meanwhile, did well for most of the categories, but lost out in those for faculty-to-student ratio and citations per paper.

Reacting to its 14th placing, NTU president Su Guaning said the university is 'pleased to be ranked among the top in Asia'.

He added: 'While the high rankings are cause to celebrate, we do not look at rankings as the only or the most important guide for developing the university.

'We shall continue to focus on enhancing the global education for our students and building our faculty and facilities befitting a top university.'

This article was first published in The Straits Times.