College Khabar Ranking Methodology
Basic Idea Behind the Ranking
Traditionally ranking of engineering colleges is an old trend run by leading magazines with help of some marketing research agencies. Some top magazines which publish such ranking include - Outlook, Dataquest, India Today etc. Question is how CollegeKhabar ranking is different from those rankings?
Quality of an institute can be best judged by the perception of the students who are studying there or by opinion of Alumnus. We tried to link this with this ranking. In second stage emphasis is given on the placements to come out with a final ranking.
Which of the following College do you think is better — ABC or XYZ? Ask this question to any college student/alumni he/she always has a certain opinion about the colleges. CollegeKhabar is trying to capture the same information (perception) of larger community. Another way to look at it is we can summarize that CollegeKhabar Ranking is an attempt to create a ranking of Most Preferred Colleges as perceived by various stake holders.
Description of various steps of the Ranking Process:
- Initially, a list of 81 leading Engineering Colleges of India are selected on the basis on their placement record and popularity.
- We then invited nominations from student community if they think any important college is missing from the list and based on numerous nominations received initial list was re-visited and few more colleges are added to the existing list.
- College administration also has an option if they wanted to opt out from the ranking.
- The final list of colleges after the completion of nomination on 13th March 2012 is made live on the College Khabar website.
Note: Any college/institute who has not conducted any placement session independently are not considered for this ranking (newly constructed IIT’s and NIT’s missing)
Ranking can only be affective if it is done by the people who are most affected by it. So it was decided that the power to vote should be in the hands of the public. The Ranking method just asks one simple question from the participants “Which Engineering College do you think is better?” and the participants have as many as 100 votes. It starts from 15th March 2012 and will be open for around one month.
Rating Point Methodology
We had been long thinking on what could be the best method of keeping points for such a voting system. The challenge here was to map how many points should be allotted each time a college is voted over another college. We tried to relate our case with sports, they also had a similar ranking problem On further research it was found that the perfect match of ranking method for our case is “Elo Rating System”. Elo Rating System is extensively used for ranking’s in Chess, Cricket, Football and other sports.
For more details on
a) Why ELO ranking?
b) What is ELO ranking?
c) Calculations and other details
Visit Behind the Scenes
Before coming out with the final ranking data cleaning exercise will be undertaken. This will be done by two mean:
1. AUTOMATIC CLEANSING: In the survey there are technological checks and security functionality built in itself to to iron out spurious survey responses . if there are attempt to circumvent the survey system votes for those users will be marked as bogus or duplicate respondents. Extensive pattern-matching algorithms were applied to the database of responses to uncover unusual similarities.
2. MANUAL CLEANSING: CK team will analyse the voting data. Even with authenticated profiles votes , if the intention is found to rig the ranking, it will lead to mark those votes as duplicate/bogus. Special attention is given to validate the multiple responses that originated from a single IP address. As extra attention to detail, we will manually go through the entire list of responses to uncover any non-machine-readable abstract patterns and will reject suspicious responses.
Note: Any attempt to rig the rankings may face action by way of disqualification of their college.
Why are we using Facebook login only?
The simple and real reason is we all at CollegeKhabar loves Facebook. Reason for the records is we think Facebook login is probably the easiest way to secure that the votes we receive are not fake and that the people voting are already authenticated.
Second phase carry focus on group interviews, industry expert opinion, data from other reputed rankings and analysis of placement records of the listed institutes. Major chunk of the pie goes to Opinion Poll/Survey and placement records for the institute.
Overall Rankings
Most preferred Engineering College as per everyone who voted is out. Click to view the results!
