<p>There are currently very few reliable international rankings available for prospective students wanting to compare teaching and research quality of different architecture schools.</p>
<p>A number of whole of institution rankings are available such as the Times Higher Education (THE) - QS World University Rankings and the Shanghai Jiaotong University
Academic Ranking of World Universities (AWRU). In these generalized league tables, entire universities and very broad multi-discipline clusters are ranked against each other. This scale of comparison offers little information about the quality and focus of any specific schools and disciplines within each institution.</p>
<p>In the Times QS ranking, academic peer review obtained via an email survey is the key source. This is largely a general reputation survey with little evidence to back up the rankings. The AWRU survey has a science bias and doesnt include the architecture discipline.</p>
<p>Design Intelligence offers a proprietary ranking of USA schools only. These are industry rankings by “leading practitioners” and the ranking criteria has a vocational focus on schools that “best prepare students for practice”. The detailed knowledge that professionals will have of the quality of teaching and research conducted by academic institutions is likely to be partial, anecdotal and retrospective, making the currency of these annual rankings of dubious value.</p>
<p>Many blog and forum contributors across the web, including members of this site, make repeated reference to the ranking of architecture schools posted on the Archsoc website. They presumably do so on the assumption that this is an authoritative resource. The ArchSoc website is run by disgruntled ex-academic Garry Stevens. His unprofessional comments are littered across the site. It has no credibility as a ranking of architecture schools. His solely quantitative criteria to rank the Best Architecture Schools is to count up the number of publications by academics that are held in libraries such as the RIBA. This is a limited and arbitrary measure that will tell a prospective student next to nothing about the quality of teaching and research in any particular school. The site is entirely unreliable as a guide and should be avoided.</p>
<p>Ultimately, any rankings in and of themselves are a blunt instrument and prospective students deciding which Architecture school to apply for should carefully investigate the research culture and teaching outcomes of any particular school they are interested in.</p>