You might have had a formidable point indeed!–if I had said:
- that I "[accepted]" the ARWU ranking (though I do prefer it, because I have an idea of what it measures, even if "what it measures" is not "the strength of a university")
- that I "liked" reputation surveys (as opposed to favoring them to everything else in this ranking--rather, preferring the "even more subjective [views of scholars who I assume hire other scholars and have passing familiarity with the graduates and research that certain schools produce]" to the "uninterpretable")**
- that "errors in data aggregation" means "errors in data sourcing" (though I don't see why schools cannot farce Thomson Reuters data if they can *Rorschach*, for instance, their "Student-Faculty ratios" in Common Data Sets, and not all of the information comes from Thomson Reuters at any rate)
- that I "don't like" those two metrics when I only used them as examples (although I don't know if they represent 40% of a school's quality of instruction, and I do know that one can add and subtend a million million million more variables to skew the results to whatever end-- 4.2. can every Professor in every school teach every student? does every division of every school intermingle with every other? might a school include non-instructional faculty (esp. medical researchers) in its count? do these metrics reward schools who admit few and graduate fewer, and does such a skew toward the minuscule contradict certain other variables' skew toward larger programs?)
**Would prefer to have the “transparent data” with which the ranking is supposedly constructed rather than the full Rorschach of metrics and weightings. Perhaps that information is to be found somewhere.