QS Ranking: Good marks for the D-USYS

The QS Ranking divides its evaluations into study subjects. For example, the subject external pageEarth Sciencescall_made covers topics such as «The evolution of life, (...), Oceanic and atmospheric phenomena, and Processes on the earth's surface», which are also focuses of the Institute for Atmosphere and Climate Science (IAC) as well as research issues of some other professorships at D-USYS. The broad range of topics at D-USYS can therefore be found in the QS ranking within three categories.

The following assessments are therefore relevant for the Department of Environmental Systems Sciences:

• external pageRanking of the Earth Sciences at ETHcall_made
  Worldwide and in Europe rank 1, since 2015
• external pageRanking of the ETH Agricultural and Forestry Sciencescall_made
  Worldwide rank 11, in Europe rank  5
• external pageRanking of ETH Zurich Environmental Sciencescall_made
  Worldwide rank 6, rank 2 in Europe
  

Good marks for ETH Zurich as a whole  

British and American universities dominate the QS ranking. As in the previous year, ETH Zurich is ranked 10th on the international list, making it the first German-speaking university on the world ranking list of universities.

Reputation rated particularly high

The QS World University Ranking has been carried out by the external pageQS Quacquarelli Symondscall_made since 2004. Out of a total of 4,300 institutions 959 were included in the international ranking.

In comparison to other rankings systems, the QS World University Rankings are heavily weighted in favour of the reputation a university carries within expert circles. The results of a survey conducted among university professors regarding the reputation of the individual universities constituted 40 per cent of the overall result. Moreover, those responsible for the rankings asked employers how highly they rated graduates from the individual universities, which amounted to 10 per cent of the overall score. Other indicators included the faculty-student ratio (20 per cent), average citation frequency per researcher (20 per cent) and the proportion of foreign scientists and students at the university (5 per cent each).

Focusing on large amounts of data

For the current QS World University Ranking, over 70,000 researchers and more than 40,000 employers were surveyed, and more than 1.2 million papers indexed by external pageScopuscall_made and external pageElseviercall_made were analysed. This makes the QS Ranking one of the world's largest surveys of its kind. However, critical voices indicate that the results perpetuate themselves: The higher a school's ranking, the better its reputation, which in turn increases its ranking.