I was in Warsaw the week before last for the International Rankings Expert Group (IREG) Forum.  The forum is designed both for those interested in rankings, and for rankers themselves – the principals behind the US News & World report rankings, the Shanghai Jiao Tong rankings, Germany’s CHE rankings, and the  Quacquarelli Symonds rankings are all regular participants.  It’s always been an interesting place to hear firsthand how rankings are evolving.  When it first started nearly a decade ago, there was a certain degree of rivalry between the main rankers.  Everyone was eager to prove the superiority of their own methodology.  There is much less of that now.  Among those who rank, there is an acceptance that there are many different ways to rank, and the desirability of any given system is largely dependent on the intended audience and the availability of data (which institutions themselves tend to control).  Nowadays, the Forum is interesting as a way to see how people are trying to refine indicators of institutional activity.

The main item of interest in Wasrsaw, though, was the inauguration of IREG’s system of quality certificates.  Seven years ago, the IREG group (including me) put together something called the Berlin Principles, a statement of good practice in rankings.  About three years ago, IREG moved to turn the Berlin Principles into the basis of a quality assurance system; that is, it would offer to certify rankings systems as being Berlin-compliant.  In Asia and Eastern Europe, where rankings have become a de facto method of quality assurance, there seems to be great demand for having external quality assurance for such rankers.

In any event, the rankings done by the Perspektywy Education Foundation and QS (the subject rankings) were the first two to volunteer for the process, and their audit groups were chaired by well-known higher education experts, such as Jamil Salmi (ex-head of the Tertiary Education Group at the World Bank) and Tom Parker (ex-Executive Director of the Institute for Higher Education Policy in Washington).  The process was essentially about compliance with the Berlin principles – most notably, the bits involving data integrity.  Passing an audit is meant to be the equivalent of an ISO 9000 certification, and both QS and Perspektywy passed, becoming the first to qualify for these certificates.

It remains to be seen, of course, if this certification will actually mean anything in terms of how people view rankings (will people be more drawn to the QS rankings now that they have an external stamp of approval?).  Regardless, this is a reasonably big step forward for rankings, generally.  Rankers are starting to show the kind of transparency that they demand of others, and their attention to quality and sound methodology is being rewarded.  It’s a step forward that everyone should applaud.