Excellence Ranking

[Camillo]

Here you can find the informations on Excellence ranking in Europe for Universities in the following fields :
Biology,Chemistry, Mathematics, Physics, Economics, Psycology, Political Science

http://www.mat.unimi.it/avviso.php?z=0; ... rali;id=77

Looking for Italy, Big surprise (for me ) that for Mathematics :

Pisa University is not included in the list of excellence while Milan university as well as Padova , Politecnico Torino(but not Politecnico Milan), and Roma Tor Vergata are included .

[jhooper3581]

Italians are 2nd best mathematicians.

[mircoFN1]

I do agree.
Moreover, the philosophy of ‘quality’ is based on measurable properties but, sometimes (better to say: often), the chosen properties are easy to be quantified but not significant as well.
The quality of a school should be mainly related to the quality of the products and not of the process. For instance, the quality of a company producing cars is in the cars not in the efficiency of the production process or in the efficacy of the management. This is rather simple to be verified: a bad car is hard to be sold.
How can you measure the quality of graduated students in a simple and sound way?

[Camillo]

I agree with you, anyhow such lists have a big " emotional " impact on many students of course...

[gugo82]

As long as there are no widely accepted methos to define rankings, every list of this kind is quite useless.

You are an engineer, Camillo, therefore you ought to know how important is to set a common standard before trying to measure things and comparing results.