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How the ranking was done May 22, 2008 To conduct the annual survey of academic excellence in the streams of arts, science, commerce, law, engineering and medicine, India Today commissioned AC Nielsen-ORG-MARG to determine the rankings. A formula based on a perception score (from an opinion poll conducted among academic experts) and an objective score (factual data furnished by colleges) was conceived. In an endeavour to make the rankings more pertinent, a few changes to last years methodology were introduced. For the city rankings, interviews were done among a larger number of experts, which helped us report the top 10 colleges in the bigger cities. In addition, the key parameters were streamlined along with the factual information collected from colleges. Research was conducted to generate the list of colleges for the survey and secondary data sources like the Internet, published reports and the Association of Indian Universities Handbook were used. Suggestions from experts were also included. A comprehensive list of more than 1,400 colleges was drawn up. To calculate the final score, more than 800 experts at the level of principals, heads of departments and deans in 12 citiesAhmedabad, Bangalore, Chandigarh Chennai, Kochi, Delhi, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai and Punewere contacted in the months of February, March and April this year. Awareness of the various institutes was worked out, after which experts were asked to distribute 100 points across five vital parameters reputation of colleges, quality of academic inputs, student care, infrastructure and job prospects. Each parameter was assigned a weight based on the importance given by the experts. Thus, the most important parameter got the maximum weight and the least, the minimum. All experts were asked to rate colleges in their fields, on the above key parameters. The overall perceptual score of a college was calculated on the basis of the ratings given by the experts on the key five parameters weighted by their importance. The colleges were then ranked on the basis of their overall perceptual scores. Unlike past surveys, this year experts were asked to rate the colleges just from their city and not from other cities being surveyed. On the basis of the output from this step, a list was obtained of colleges to be evaluated at a national level. In the next step, academic experts rated the colleges on the list in a national perspective. In addition, the experts were also shown the city list and asked to rate the colleges of their city. This change also helped address a growing concern among institutions about whether academic experts could rate a relatively smaller college which is not in his city. (See graphic - The methodology: A comparison) Hence, all colleges got a fairer chance of getting a higher score. It also produced a more robust
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sample of experts, which helped generate a list of the top 10 colleges in the bigger cities instead of just five colleges as was done last year. To determine the overall ranking, only colleges that figured in the top 50 in arts, science and commerce streams and top 25 for the engineering, medicine and law streams were contacted for factual data. The colleges that did not provide factual data were not considered in the final ranking process. All the factual information related to a college was rescaled and then aggregated to get an overall factual score. To calculate the overall score, a 70:30 weightage was then assigned to perceptual and factual scores, respectively,the rationale being the establishment of consistency with the previous years study. This methodology of ranking, based on both perceptual and factual data, provides a comprehensive picture of each college rated. The AC Nielsen-ORG-MARG team for the survey comprised Chandana Banerjee, Ram Mohan Dhara, Deep Chowdhury, Maria Rani Tirkey, Neha Yadav, Naveen Wadhwa and Sateesh Nair. An India Today-AC Nielsen-ORG-MARG survey of colleges

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