Current Science

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The National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) exercise is a good example of what the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie called 'The danger of a single story'. All lives are a complex overlap of many stories and yet the human tendency is to compress all this to a simple one-dimensional narrative. NIRF reduces the vast complexity of higher education into a single score. 'Teaching, learning and resources,' 'Research and professional practices,' 'Graduation outcomes,' 'Outreach and inclusivity,' and 'Perception' are further elaborated into sub-heads, and with weights assigned to each broad head, and more weights assigned to the sub-heads within each head, and with complex marking and weighting schemes much fuzziness is added, leading finally to a single score. In this way, the narrative that emerges is no story at all. In this note, we use the NIRF 2017 bibliometric data for top colleges in India to show that Loyola College, Chennai and Bishop Heber College, Tiruchirappalli, among the institutions that participated in the NIRF exercise, are arguably the best research colleges in the country.
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