To Trust or Not to Trust: Ranking China's International Schools
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Yet another ranking of China’s international schools was released this week, but gaps in the data make the results suspect.
The China International School Competitiveness Ranking 2019 was announced by Kinglead, an education resources and services platform, on Dec 3. Kinglead organized their rankings in two separate lists; one using acceptances into US colleges, and the other using UK acceptances.
Based on its rankings, Beijing has four of the top 10 international schools in terms of US acceptances, and none in the top in terms of UK acceptances.
Kinglead also used two other ranking criteria on both lists: International Certifications and an evaluation of faculty based on data such as student-teacher ratio.
The deeper we dug into this data, the more we realized that its validity is suspect due to its incomplete nature.
While the ranking criteria is quite robust, there is simply too many data points missing for the rankings to be truly useful. For instance, only 26 of Beijing’s international schools turn up on the list at all, with many prominent schools left off entirely, presumably due to not having any of the three data points available for analysis, or perhaps because they are sending a disproportionate number of students to non-US/UK universities (such as the French School or the Canadian School).
Out of the 26 that were listed, a mere six had all three data points – Western Academy of Beijing (WAB), Beijing City International School (BCIS), Beijing Royal School, Harrow Beijing, Yew Chung International School of Beijing (YCIS Beijing) (and all ranked quite similarly).
As we blogged before, ranking in no way represents the quality or education found at a school, in a classroom, nor the impact a particular professor may have on an individual student.
Like Hurun Education’s controversial rankings that were released earlier this year, Kinglead’s ranking system need to be taken with a grain of salt.
According to the Rankings, here are the Beijing schools in the top 50 for US and UK university enrollments with their corresponding ranking:
US |
UK |
In response to the Competitiveness Rankings of China’s International Schools 2019, we received some opinions from parents.
Likewise, Tim Coghlan echoed a similar sentiment, “My kids too young, but basically we would totally ignore these lists in preference for actual personal research and school visits.”
“I like to look at these things just to see but they do NOT influence our decision at all. And I wouldn’t go in search of it either. We look at location, curriculum, have a school visit & definitely talk to other parents!” said Elisabeth Koch.
Photos: jinglingedu.com
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