Misleading university rankings: cause and cure for discrepancies between nominal and attained weights

Recent research into university ranking methodologies uncovered several methodological problems among the systems currently in vogue. One of these is the discrepancy between the nominal and attained weights. The problem is the summation of unstandardized indicators for the total scores used in ranking. It is demonstrated that weight discrepancy can misinform and hence mislead. The problem can be prevented statistically had the indicator scores been standardised prior to weighting and summation.