Abstract
Since 2000, the Italian Censis research institute has compiled, on behalf of La Repubblica newspaper, the Grande Guida all’Università, a report which ranks Italian universities and faculties according to their quality. With the 2008 publication, devoted to students enrolled on degree courses in 2008–2009, the Guida has gone into its ninth edition.
In the Italian version the title “Arbitro, c’è rigore?” played upon words and with the meaning of the noun “arbitro” (referee and arbiter) and “rigore” (severity and penalty): “Arbiter, is there any penalty?”
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Notes
- 1.
Censis evaluates universities along four dimensions: services, study grants, facilities, and website. Faculties are assessed by means of composite indicators of five areas. It should be borne in mind that the university league table does not depend on the results obtained by faculties, and vice versa.
- 2.
Censis calls “family” each “area” of the university system.
- 3.
A definition of simple and composite indicators follows.
- 4.
An interesting alternative would be the use of the theoretical maximum and minimum with the simple indicators for which such values are determinable: this technique would make it possible to reduce the distances among units observed in terms of residuals among normalized values of the simple indicators.
- 5.
Students “in corso” have fulfilled their examination requirements within the scheduled deadlines, whilst students “fuori corso” are still attending university beyond the duration of their courses because they have not yet completed their examination requirements.
- 6.
Because P5 was furnished by Censis as a rate, it was not possible to derive the value of n 2. The score for P was obtained as the simple arithmetic mean of the simple indicators.
- 7.
In the case of the educational delivery, the weighting used by Censis raises obvious questions concerning the weights (it is not stated whether specific choices were made) because the denominator of the formula should be 3.5 instead of 4. For the sake of consistency, we decided to keep the formula applied by Censis.
- 8.
Likewise the case of the educational delivery, in the academic staff profile the denominator should be 2 and not 3. For the sake of consistency, we decided to keep the formula applied by Censis.
- 9.
The correlation between D 2 and D 3 is negative because in the Italian university system who offer a higher number of courses usually has a minor tenured academic staff.
- 10.
The correlation between PD 1 and PD 4 is negative because a higher average age of tenured academic staff implies that the same staff taught the majority of the courses (untenured “extra-academic” staff usually taught a minor number of courses).
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Bernardi, L., Bolzonello, P., Tuzzi, A. (2011). University League Tables. In: Attanasio, M., Capursi, V. (eds) Statistical Methods for the Evaluation of University Systems. Contributions to Statistics. Physica-Verlag HD. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7908-2375-2_3
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