Analysing the performance of New Zealand universities in the 2010 Academic Ranking of World Universities

The performance of New Zealand universities relative to the world’s top university

Instead of focussing on overall ranking, in Figure 4 we show the performance of the New Zealand universities relative to the world’s top performing university (Harvard University) using the overall weighted score that determines the final ranking of universities. This gives a sense of how the New Zealand universities are performing compared to the top university, as opposed to focusing on their position in the overall rankings. The score for the top-performing university is set at 100, with the performance of the other universities placed relative to this benchmark. As all of the New Zealand universities are ranked outside of the top 100, the methodology used to determine the relative score in the ARWU has been applied to the published raw ARWU data to generate a derived relative score for each of the New Zealand universities.

A feature of Figure 4 is the relative stability of the performance of each of the New Zealand universities to the world’s top-performing university. There is little evidence that the performance of the New Zealand universities has changed significantly over the period. However, the G8 universities have appeared to improve, on average, in 2010. A significant increase in the relative score in the Thomson Reuters journal publication measure influenced this result. This increase in journal publication may be related to the introduction of the Excellence in Research Australia (ERA) research measurement exercise.

Figure 4: Relative overall scores of New Zealand universities