thank you for sharing the article, this is prescient "Over the years, according to records and interviews, the university had pored over spreadsheets in minute detail, inflated faculty head count, ordered what professors believed was unnecessary equipment and spent millions luring higher-scoring students — all for rankings." reminds me of our #nirfchor :P

Thank you. I suppose one of the abiding problems of rankings is also that, even with best intentions, they create their own perverse incentives. As a comparative example, the resignation of President of University of Florida in 2024 over its decline in rankings is an interesting case in this regard << https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/17/us/politics/rankings-university-of-florida-ben-sasse.html >>

1) interrogate the data, most of the submissions are spurious by a quarter to a half

2) it gives an indication of likely ranking, but in absence of any other metric can work as a bad proxy. Case in point is an institute in Bhuvaneshwar, and not the one that you are thinking, this one does not have a website or a building but is in the top 10 law school in India as per NIRF.

3) spend money and hire a cheap audit firm to randomly check one data stream per submission and penalise institution which submit false info

Recently, members of a NAAC inspection team that assessed Koneru Lakshmaiah Education Foundation (KLEF) have been accused of financial corruption. Incidentally, “in the overall NIRF rankings, KLEF performed better than IISER Pune, which ranked 42; IIT Ropar, which ranked 48; IIT Mandi (72); and IIT Patna (73). It also did better than NIT Warangal and NIT Calicut, which were ranked 53 and 54” as per << https://indianexpress.com/article/education/cbi-naac-bribery-scam-andhra-university-centre-accreditation-9824953/ >>

Now granted that this particular news does not concern institutes/departments/centres that offer legal education but it does raise following questions given that the methodology for assessment in NIRF is same for every participating institute. It is also not the first time that such apparent irregularities have been observed in NIRF between well-established institutes falling behind relatively newer ones.

(1) How reliable is the data submitted by institutes to NIRF?

(2) Is NIRF an adequate source of information for prospective applicants to assess the quality of an institute?

(3) How can NIRF be reformed to better safeguard against being hijacked via data manipulation?