Tekedia Intelligence provides many different types of numerical rankings and lists to help Nigeria students narrow their university search. We describe the methodology behind our ranking below.
Introduction
When we started this project many months ago, we discussed the possibility of severe criticisms because of our methodology or technique. Yet, we are very optimistic that what we hope to offer has value for students, parents, guardians and indeed the institutions. We do believe that some metrics are global standards and every institution must aspire. Quality of faculty, excellence in academic program, availability of learning infrastructure, value to employers, research output, among others are metrics any school should open to be assessed.
Tekedia Intelligence offers a tool, as a starting point, for stakeholders to use to evaluate the choice of schools. In a non-homogenous society like Nigeria where the Northern students prefer, overwhelmingly the schools in the North and their Southern counterparts those in the South. We are ethnic-blind in the methodology. In other words, a student from Sokoto who prefers Usman Danfodio University despite, perhaps, a better academic program, for a chosen discipline, say, in University of Calabar, will not get any benefit from our work.
We went through stages to develop the model and used extensive data and publications from JAMB, WAEC, schools, NUC, among others. For the classification, we followed exactly how JAMB has categorized school into Private, Federal, State, Federal University of Technology, State University of Technology, and so on. In each category, we considered all the schools and focused on the first ten, where applicable, largely because of resources. One major factor we considered in our ranking is how students enter into degree programs. For schools that encourage preliminary programs that diminish the influence of WAEC and JAMB in admission, they lose marks on the admission process.
Thankfully, the availability of national examination board like JAMB made many things very easy. We relied on the JAMB cut-off marks to determine the difficulty of getting admission in selected departments. We then averaged those marks across the board. Except the schools that pursue the preliminary programs, admission process to most disciplines, with some exceptions, is largely uniform, and was easy to assess
Just as we developed some quantitative models for our stock market index, we relied on standard metrics. Tekedia Intelligence then decides what it considers to be the key driver for student attainment and success in today’s education.
What We Did
We have 16 indicators that guided our ranking. For each factor, we put a weight which to our ability reflects what we think that school merits or based on data we have obtained or assessments from students, schools or public. Then we rank the schools among themselves based on a weighted composite across the factors. Some of the metrics are
- JAMB Cutoffs (student selectivity and admission process)
- Academic reputation by students (the more first choice, the better)
- WAEC/SSCE Minimum Requirements
- Admission Through Preliminary Programs
- Number of Professors and PhD holders in faculty
- Assessment from Employers
- Students First Choices in JAMB (an indication of value)
- Diversity of Programs
- Academic Environment and Facilities, and National labs on campus
- Nearby Industrial Ecosystem
- Recreation and school location
- University Management and academic session stability
- Graduation rate (we took samples of some metrication documents and convocation and compared how many got in and the number that finished)
- Alumni activity (an indication of satisfaction with their education)
- Evidence of private-university partnerships (funded labs by companies, etc)
- International visibility
- Research and publications
Please note that some metrics have higher weight than others. We developed a survey which we wanted to send to all the schools. Unfortunately, the cost was just much for us to execute. Yet, we think our estimates are rational as we spoke with some of the school officials, students and the public. We hope in the future to ask schools to rank others so that we can get assessment of what the peers think among each other.
How We Arrived At A School rank
We assigned the scores to each of the metrics and then calculated the weighted sum of the scores. We then rescaled it so that the school with the highest mark gets 5 (it does not mean they have perfect scores across metrics). That proportion was applied to other schools. We then rounded the numbers to two decimal places and ranked them in descending order. When schools tie, we list them alphabetical and miss the next rank below. For instance if School A and B are tied at 3.7 and ranked #6, there will not be #7, the next below will be #8.
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