Publication: Improving quality assessment of composite indicators in university rankings: a case study of French and German universities of excellence
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2011-07
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Abstract
Composite indicators play an essential role for benchmarking higher education
institutions. One of the main sources of uncertainty building composite indicators and,
undoubtedly, the most debated problem in building composite indicators is the
weighting schemes (assigning weights to the simple indicators or subindicators)
together with the aggregation schemes (final composite indicator formula). Except the
ideal situation where weights are provided by the theory, there clearly is a need for
improving quality assessment of the final rank linked with a fixed vector of weights.
We propose to use simulation techniques to generate random perturbations around any
initial vector of weights to obtain robust and reliable ranks allowing to rank universities
in a range bracket. The proposed methodology is general enough to be applied no matter
the weighting scheme used for the composite indicator. The immediate benefit achieved
is a reduction of the uncertainty associated with the assessment of a specific rank which
is not representative of the real performance of the university, and an improvement of
the quality assessment of composite indicators used to rank. To illustrate the proposed
methodology we rank the French and the German universities involved in their
respective 2008 Excellence Initiatives.
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Keywords
Composite indicators, Rankings, Benchmarking, Higher education institutions, Weighting schemes, Simulation techniques