World's Best Universities: Statistical Scores and Weightings

U.S.News & World Report's World's Best Universities rankings, based on the Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings, identified these to be world's top universities in 2009.

Schools by Location The Top 200 Asian and Middle Eastern Australian and New Zealand British and European Canadian Schools by Subject The Top 200 Arts and Humanities Engineering and IT Life Sciences and Biomedicine Natural & Physical Sciences Social Sciences Methodologies World's Best Universities Methodology Subject Area Rankings Methodology Academic Peer Review Citations per Faculty Member Student-to-Faculty Ratio Employer Review Survey International Student and International Faculty Factors Weightings and Statistical Scores About the World's Best Universities Rankings

How are the weights and statistical scores determined for U.S.News & World Report's 2009 World's Best Universities rankings, which are based on data from the THE-QS World University Rankings produced in association with QS Quacquarelli Symonds?

This page explains in detail the process (called standardization or z-score aggregation) used to convert raw scores into the final scores that appear in our World's Best Universities rankings tables.

Designing a ranking on a single variable is relatively straightforward. Compiling a multi-index ranking is a little more complex. In combining the indexes for U.S. News's World's Best Universities rankings, the following guiding principles have been followed:

• There is fair and even application of weighting across the whole range for each indicator.
• Intuitive and comparable scores are used for each of the five indicators.
• Great strengths in particular broad subject fields should contribute to the overall position of an institution.

Weightings and the Statistical Calculations. The allocation of weightings for U.S. News's World's Best Universities rankings based on data from the THE-QS World University Rankings remains the responsibility of the team at Times Higher Education. The current weightings—assigned by indicator—can be found here. Once the data are collected and the weightings are decided upon, the next step is to calculate standard scores for each column of data so that they are compatible. This allows us to combine the data reliably and apply the weightings fairly in the calculation of the overall score. Since 2007, a more complicated but widely used standardization or normalization method has been adopted involving z-scores. There are numerous online sources explaining how this works, including a Wikipedia entry and a UCLA article.

Compiling the Final Scores. Compiling the final score is relatively straightforward. We simply multiply each indicator's standardized score by its weighting factor, sum each school's standardized scores together, round to one decimal place, and then scale to the top-performing institution, resulting in a final score out of 100.