thinking with my fingers: Schadenfreude

Torill Mortensen: writes in her blog that "If you read Norwegian and are concerned about
- college and university ranking
- statistics
- journalism
- the quality reform

you should read Sven Erik Skarsbø's open letter to Terje Osmundsen (pdf) about the weekly magazine Mandag Morgen and their ranking of Norwegian Colleges and Universities.

Sometimes it feels really good to see incompetence blatantly revealed by people who have taken their time both to find the flaws and check them. Delicious reading on a slightly disillusioned day."

Indeed. "Mandag morgen", a Norwegian newsletter, did a ranking of Norwegian colleges and universities that were so full of errors and bad logic that tearing it apart must have been quite fun work for Skarsbø.

For instance, "Mandag morgen" argues that diversity is important, and goes on to rank colleges having 66 % female staff higher on "diversity" than colleges with 50,3 %. (So a 100 % female staff would give top score on "diversity".)

"Mandag morgen" also gives higher rank to colleges with high student:teacher ratio than others. Most students would think that it would be a good idea to go to a college where there were few students per teacher, but according to "Mandag morgen", this shows "inefficency".

Even given their faulty logic and strange criteria, "Mandag morgen" doesn't manage to calculate the scores correctly.

The whole "study" tells a lot about the state of Norwegian colleges - at least the colleges that have "educated" the people behind this "study".