Top 100 Ranked Indian Institutions by NIRF 2021 in Engineering: An Interesting Analysis of Individual/Combined Metrics

Abstract

This paper analyses scores of the top 100 institutions ranked by the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF- 2021), Ministry of Education, Government of India in the Engineering category. It considered all five major parameters: Teaching, Learning & Resources, Research and Professional Practice, Graduation Outcome, Outreach and Inclusivity and Perception. Albeit the methodology has been publicly available, the participating institutions could not verify their scores for the ten sub-parameters (metric/combined metric) out of 17 even after the announcement of rankings every year. Of the ten, perception is one such parameter that carries 10% weight. The NIRF defines the functions for nine sub-parameters based on the data submitted by the participating institutions. Having done the extensive analysis in this work, it is found that there are quite a few cases where the function, representing the relationship between the data and score, is neither monotonically increasing nor decreasing. Hence, this paper compares the percentage change in average scores of the top 10, 25, 50 and 100, and bottom 10 and 50 ranked institutions on various parameters/sub-parameters to the extent possible and, in a few cases, reveals the nonlinear-multimodal function correlating the data and the scores. Finally, this work concludes with a few recommendations for the institutions to perform well in NIRF rankings in future and provides suggestions to NIRF to rank the institutions based on their size, years of existence and funding support by the government. Keywords — Engineering Education, Rankings, Quality Education, Ranking Parameters