Education chief Arthur Li Kwok-cheung has refused to comment on a controversial survey on university rankings which has been criticised by academics. Legislator Ng Leung-sing asked at the Legco meeting on Wednesday whether the University Grants Committee had assessed whether the research used in the study by the Education18.com website and the University of Hong Kong's Public Opinion Programme, was scientific and objective, as well as fair and reasonable to the universities, and also whether action had been taken 'to remove misconceptions'. The University of Hong Kong came out top of the survey, released in April, followed by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, on the basis of factors that included admission grades, research record and graduates' performance. HKU conducted an opinion poll of 1,513 people to gauge their perceptions of various institutions, which contributed 25 per cent of the weightings that determined the final rankings. Lingnan University was ranked bottom, below the Hong Kong Institute of Education. Professor Li told legislators that neither the administration nor the UGC could comment on the survey. 'Not only would it be quite wrong, in terms of academic freedom and institutional autonomy for the UGC to make any comment on the conduct of this survey, the UGC is also in no position to assess whether the survey methodology is scientific, objective, fair and reasonable,' he said. But HKIEd registrar Francis Cheung Wing-ming said the criteria used were biased towards research institutions. In an article written for this newspaper this week, Lingnan University president Edward Chen Kwan-yiu pointed to defects in data collection. He added that public perception of universities should not be used to determine rankings. The website editor Joy Shi Mei-chun was not available for comment.
