PU jumps 3 spots, 36th best in India

Amarjot Kaur

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, December 4

Ringing the good news for Panjab University (PU), the recently released QS Asia Rankings-2020 have rated it the 36th best among Indian universities and educational institutes. The rankings point at the PU’s steady climb from its previous rank-39.

In the continent, the PU has, however, figured in the bracket of 291-300, showing no shift from last year’s slab.

The National University of Singapore has topped the rankings, while the IIT-Bombay stood first in India. In the region, the IIT-Ropar and Thapar University have been ranked ahead of the PU.

Commenting on the PU’s rank, Prof Ashish Jain, director, Internal Quality Assessment Cell, PU, said: “The university has been improving mainly because of the research. The research environment of the PU has improved over the last one or one-and-a-half years. Also, to get the credit of the publications, we ran a special exercise wherein the official IDs of individual faculty members was mapped to their publications in Scopus, which resulted in reflection of the true count of PU faculty’s publications and their citations.”

Eleven indicators were used to compile the QS Asia University Rankings. Academic reputation (30 per cent) and employer reputation (20 per cent) are assessed using data from the large global survey of academics conducted by QS each year. The faculty-student ratio holds 10 per cent weightage while the international research network (10 per cent) assesses the degree of international openness in terms of research collaboration for each evaluated institution using data provided by Scopus. 

Citations per paper (10 per cent) and papers per faculty (5 per cent) are both assessed using data from the Scopus database. 

QS Asia rankings also rate varsities on staff with a PhD (5 per cent), proportion of international faculty (2.5 per cent) and proportion of international students (2.5 per cent). The rankings also have proportion of inbound exchange students (2.5 per cent) and proportion of outbound exchange students (2.5 per cent) to offer additional insights into the internationalisation activity at universities in Asia, assessing the relative size of each institution’s inbound and outbound student exchange programmes.

While the PU failed to make it to the top 1,000 educational institutes in the QS World University Rankings for two consecutive years, mainly because it scored less in ‘academic reputation’, it dropped out of top 50 institutions in of the QS Indian University Rankings, because of which it also lost out on MHRD’s ‘Institute of Eminence’ tag.