Leafiest Groves Of Academe

Outlook has started ranking universities for undergraduate, non-professional courses. This ranking applies for courses like BSc, BCom, BA, BMM/BMS, etc., and covers 68 universities. This ranking process faced the following challenges:

1. Many universities which confer degrees rely on a collegiate system for course delivery, but do not have strong data on colleges.

2. Colleges from a given university vary widely on their infrastructure, faculty etc.

3. Many private universities do not operate a collegiate system, and data is therefore easier to get. Given these, it was decided that we would compare undergraduate courses based on a combination of publicly available data (cut-offs, course structure, number of papers on the specialised subjects, etc.) and obtain additional data where needed from universities. Universities control the syllabi, papers and confer the degrees, even when course delivery is collegiate. For these, data for key colleges, where available, was used to supplement university data.

An extensive list of universities was drawn up, who were contacted. A follow-up, with emails, calls and field visits, was instituted. Detailed objective questionnaires were sent to over 180 universities. The questionnaires measured universities on four key parameters (Selection process, Academics, Student Development and Infrastructure). A separate perceptual survey was conducted among students & faculty in 17 cities.

This ranking covers 68 universities, whose data was verified from public sources. The Drshti research team included A.K.Balaji Prasad, Nitish Pratap Singh & Jignesh Bafna.