This year KAIST has been placed 90th place overall in the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings. Unfortunately this is a slight slip from the university’s 79th placing in last year’s rankings. However it is still maintaining its excellence among top Asian universities and has been acknowledged as the top university in the nation by JoongAng Ilbo in its latest university rankings.

The QS World University Rankings is a league table that annually ranks the world’s top universities using various indicators. These indicators can be divided into six criteria, each holding varying weighting: academic reputation (worth 40% of the point score used to determine a university’s rank), employer reputation (10%), faculty student ratio (20%), citations per faculty (20%), the number of international faculty members (5%) and the number of international students (5%).

In the case of the first two indicators, the scores are largely determined by a global survey. QS asks academics to name the leading universities in their respective field of expertise and takes comments from employers on which universities produce the best employees. Although the accumulated survey data are largely subjective opinions, as the information is gathered from individuals excelling in their own areas the results are considered accurate. This year over 33,000 academics and 16,000 employers participated in the survey, allowing the results to reflect a wide range of opinions.

Citations per faculty are measured using Elsevier’s Scopus database, which measures publication and citation data worldwide. From the various sources of data available, this specific one was chosen as it handles the widest range of journals and is consistently being updated. The citation numbers used for the ranking is per faculty member rather than the total number of citations. This is to level the grounds for universities with smaller faculty size compared to its larger competitors. Therefore the rankings in this area attempt to place quality over quantity. The significance of the citations score comes from the fact that the frequency of a work cited is usually indicative of the amount of influence the research has had upon others around the world.

The final three criteria are not surveyed directly by QS, but simply analyzed after the collation of data provided by each of the universities themselves. The faculty student ratio indicates the amount of attention faculty members provide for their students. Therefore universities that take in smaller numbers of students and care for them are considered more effective than universities that irresponsibly take in a plethora of students. The criteria on the international faculty members and international students serve as benchmarking for the universities’ international interests. These criteria encourage educational institutes to endeavor to assemble the best group of faculty members while having great appeal to the overseas community.

In the QS rankings, although placed 90th overall, KAIST managed to hold onto its subcategory rankings. It came 27th in Engineering and Information Technology, 57th in Natural Sciences and 127th in Life Sciences.
In respect to the overall scores, only three Korean universities made it into the top 100 list. Seoul National University (SNU) topped the national list with 42nd overall, KAIST came in second with 90th place and Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) followed at 98th place.

However, unlike the QS Rankings the university rankings made by JoongAng Ilbo for Korean universities showed different national results due to variations in scoring criteria. For the fourth consecutive year, KAIST claimed first place with 293 points. This was followed by POSTECH (275points), SNU (252points), Yonsei University (251points) and Korea University (245points) respectively, who maintained their rankings from the previous year.

The criteria for JoongAng Ilbo are slightly different from QS rankings. First of all, the rankings are carried out only for universities with four-year undergraduate terms. Also the criteria are split into the following categories: academic peer review (110points), international orientation (60points), citations per faculty (110points) and recruiter review (70points).

Although KAIST has slipped in terms of overall QS University Rankings this year, it is maintaining its prominence nationally. With the constant variations in the factors that determine the universities’ scores, it is difficult to accurately judge the institutes’ standings. Therefore it is important to note that one of the major purposes of these rankings is to give a brief indication on the performances of each university.