National university rankings to include social contribution

By Yojana Sharma. India’s prestigious institutes of technology, or IITs, will spearhead a national system of university rankings, drawing up relevant parameters even though they are not themselves universities, Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani announced last week at a meeting of IIT heads in Chennai. Read more...

By Dan Berrett, The Chronicle of Higher Education. Student course evaluations are often misused statistically and shed little light on the quality of teaching, two scholars at the University of California at Berkeley argue in the draft of a new paper. "We’re confusing consumer satisfaction with product value," Philip B Stark, a professor of statistics at Berkeley, said in an interview. Read more...