In the Dark

The recent decision by Maynooth University to appoint a Ranking Strategy and Insights Officer in an attempt to raise the University’s position in university league tables has inspired me to create a new spinout company to provide a service for higher education institutions who want to improve their standing in rankings while avoiding the expense and complication of actually improving the institution or indeed while continuing to pursue policies that drive performance in the opposite direction.

I have decided to name my new company CLARTIVERT™ and the extensive suite of services we will provide is called the Clartiverse™.

The idea of CLARTIVERT™ is to produce, in return for a modest payment equivalent to the salary cost of a Ranking Strategy and Insights Officer, a bespoke league table that guarantees a specified position for any given institution. This can be either your own institution whose position you would like to raise or some competitor institution that you wish to lower. We then promote the league table thus constructed in the world’s media (who seem to like this sort of thing).

The idea behind this company is that the existing purveyors of rankings deliberately manufacture artificial “churn” in the league tables by changing their weighting model every year. Why not take this process to its logical conclusion? Our not-at-all dodgy software works by including so many metrics that an appropriate combination can always be chosen to propel any institution to the top (or bottom). We then produce We achieve all this by deplying a highly sophisticated branch of mathematics called Linear Algebra which we dress up in the fancy terms “Machine Learning” and  “Artificial Intelligence” to impress potential buyers.

To begin we will concentrate on research assessment. This is, of course, covered by existing league tables but our approach is radically different. We will desploy a vastly expanded set of metrics, many of which are currently unused. For example, on top of the usual bibliometric indicators like citation counts and numbers of published papers, we add number of authors, number of authors whose names start with a given letter of the alphabet, letter frequencies occuring in published texts, etc. We adopt a similar approach to other indicators, such as number of academic staff, number of PhD students, number of research managers, initial letters of names of people in these different categories, distribution of salaries for each, and so on.

As well as these quantities themselves we calculate mathematical functions of them, including polynomials, exponentials, logarithms and trigonometricfunctions; sine and cosine have proved very useful in early testing. All these indicators are combined in various ways: not only added, but also subtracted, multiplied, and/or divided until a weighted combination can be found that places your institution ahead of all the others.

In future we will roll out additional elements of the Clartiverse™ to cover other aspects of higher education including not only teaching and student satisfaction but also more important things such as commercialisation and financial impropriety.

P.S. The name Clartiver is derived from the word clart and is not to be confused with that of any other companies providing similar but less impressive services.