Monday, July 25, 2016

Looks Like THE isn't Big in Japan Anymore





It has taken a long time but it seems that Japanese universities are getting a little irritated about the Times Higher Education (THE) World and Asian University Rankings.

I have commented on the THE Asian rankings here, here and here.

According to the Nikkei Asian Review,

  Research University 11, a consortium of Japan's top 11 universities, issued a statement earlier this month that the Times Higher Education ranking should not be used to determine national policy or as an achievement indicator.
Another umbrella group, the Research University Network of Japan, which includes universities and research institutions, has opposed the ranking every year Japanese universities have taken big tumbles.
and

So achieving a higher ranking does not necessarily correlate with providing better educations and research opportunities.
For some universities, there is another worry -- politics. The Japanese government in 2013 said it would aim to ensure that Japanese universities rank among the world's top 100 over the following decade. Now, Japanese universities are required to develop specific strategies to help the government reach this "revitalization" goal.

Saturday, July 23, 2016

Another Important Ranking




Another ranking that should be looked at very carefully is the International Mathematical Olympiad, designed for pre-university students, the first of which was held in Romania in 1959. The competition includes problems in algebra, pre-calculus, complex geometry and functional equations.

Twenty years ago the Olympiad was dominated by ex-communist Eastern Europe. In 1996, first place was taken by Romania while Hungary was third and  Russia fourth. Now, East Asia and the Chinese diaspora are dominant: South Korea second, China third, Singapore fourth, Taiwan fifth, North Korea sixth, Hong Kong ninth, Japan tenth.

The USA is first this year, as it was in 2015, with an all-male team whose members have three South Asian and three Chinese surnames.

The rankings look pretty much like the PISA and TIMSS test scores. Combined with the recent coding competition and the Top500 supercomputing ranking, they suggest the intellectual and economic leaders of this century will be in East Asia and Eastern Europe including Russia.

The USA and the UK might do fairly well if they can introduce and maintain sensible immigration and educational selection policies.

The American success, unfortunately, is not good enough for the conventional education media. The team is not diverse enough: no women, no historically underrepresented minorities. So far nobody has protested about the absence of transgender or openly gay students but perhaps their time will eventually come.

Education Week reports that:

"According to Mark Saul, the director of competitions for the Mathematical Association of America, not a single African-American or Hispanic student—and only a handful of girls—has ever made it to the Math Olympiad team in its 50 years of existence."

To overcome this problem, participants in the events leading up to the Olympiad have competitions that test creativity and collaboration and are judged subjectively.   

"In the past few years, MathCounts added two new middle school programs to try to diversify its participant pool—National Math Club and the Math Video Challenge.

"Schools or teachers who sign up for the National Math Club receive a kit full of activities and resources, but there's no special teacher training and no competition attached.

The Math Video Challenge is a competition, but a collaborative one. Teams of four students make a video illustrating a math problem and its real-world application.

After the high-pressure Countdown round at this year's national MathCounts competition, in which the top 12 students went head to head solving complex problems in rapid fire, the finalists for the Math Video Challenge took the stage to show their videos. The demographics of that group looked quite different from those in the competition round—of the 16 video finalists, 13 were girls and eight were African-American students. The video challenge does not put individual students on the hot seat—so it's less intimidating by design. It also adds the element of artistic creativity to attract a new pool of students who may not see themselves as "math people."

An 8th grade team from the Ron Clark Academy, an independent middle school in Atlanta that serves low-income students, was among the finalists. The students illustrated a complicated multistep problem entirely through rap. None had ever been involved in a math competition before."

In other words, the competitions will be less and less about mathematics and more and more about making rap videos and the like. No doubt Russia, China and Korea will be flocking to the US to see how its done. Much the same thing has been happening with national competitive debating.



Here are this year's results and those for 2015 and 1996.


Rank 2016
Team
Rank 2015
Rank 1996
1
USA
1
2
2
South Korea
3
8
3
China
2
6
4
Singapore
10
25
5
Taiwan
18
20
6
North Korea
4
--
7=
Russia
8
4
7=
UK
22
5
9
Hong Kong
28
27
10
Japan
22
11
11
Vietnam
5
7
12=
Canada
9
16
12=
Thailand
12
47
14
Hungary
20
3
15=
Brazil
22
52
15=
Italy
29
25
17
Philippines
36
74
18
Bulgaria
29
11
19
Germany
27
10
20=
Romania
13
1
20=
Indonesia
29
70
22
Israel
40
15
23
Mexico
19
53
24
Iran
7
9
25=
Australia
6
23
25=
France
14
32
25=
Peru
16
--
28
Kazakhstan
28
25
29
Turkey
20
19
30=
Armenia
26
34
30=
Croatia
15
34
30=
Ukraine
11
18
33
Mongolia
35
44
34
India
34
37
35=
Bangladesh
33
--
35=
Belarus
39
21
37=
Czech Republic
45
28
37=
Sweden
60
40
39
Macau
35
48
40
Serbia
40
29
41
Saudi Arabia
41
--
42
Poland
17
13
43
Switzerland
45
62
44
Netherlands
43
59
45
Bosnia - Herzogovina
43
57
46
Austria
60
42
47
Portugal
52
13
48
Syria
54
--
49
Spain
72
48
50=
Lithuania
65
32
50=
Greece
51
22
52
Belgium
56
31
53
New Zealand
49
--
54
Azerbaijan
48
58
55
Slovakia
33
17
56
Malaysia
57
72
57
Argentina
52
29
58
South Africa
55
43
59=
Costa Rica
67
--
59=
Georgia
42
30
61
Estonia
70
55
62
Tajikistan
64
--
63=
Moldova
38
41
63=
Slovenia
73
44
63=
Cyprus
63
69
66=
Sri Lanka
70
53
66=
Colombia
49
46
68
El Salvador
95
--
69=
Albania
77
67
69=
Turkmenistan
58
72
71=
Finland
82
39
71=
Paraguay
67
--
73
Macedonia
74
46
74
Latvia
79
33
75
Ireland
77
61
76
Tunisia
75
--
77=
Kosovo
86
--
77=
Uzbekistan
58
--
79
Morocco
80
65
80
Nicaragua
82
--
81
Denmark
69
48
82
Algeria
62
--
83
Ecuador
80
--
84=
Kyrgyzstan
92
67
84=
Norway
65
37
86
Venezuela
96
--
87
Puerto Rico
90
--
88=
Montenegro
89

88=
Nigeria
88

90
Iceland
75
56
91=
Chile
97
71
91=
Pakistan
85
--
93
Uruguay
93
--
94
Trinidad & Tobago
82
60
95
Luxemburg
97
--
96=
Cambodia
86
--
96=
Myanmar
--
--
98
Uganda
100
--
99
Kenya
--
--
100=
Honduras
--
--
100=
Madagascar
--
--
102
Jamaica
102
--
103
Botswana
103
--
104=
Egypt


104=
Ghana
101
--
106
Tanzania
106
--
107=
Iraq
--
--
107=
Liechtenstein
90
--
109
Laos
--
--