TCN News
Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) pointed to a lag in MHRD-NIRF data as reason for pushing down the university’s annual ranking on the list on Friday.
AMU’s press coordination department has stated that there is “serious discrepancy in terms of PhD output” that has “adversely affected Aligarh Muslim University’s ranking announced by the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) 2020.”
Professor Salim Beg, Chairman of the Ranking Committee mentioned that AMU has 2911 full-time research scholars while the NIRF website data has recorded the total as only 33. “This needs immediate rectification,” he said.
The official press statement also reveals that data as uploaded by AMU is available on the university website wherein it is specified that the number of full time PhD students to have graduated in the academic years 2016, 2017 and 2018 are 387, 312 and 363 respectively. However, the MHRD-NIRF data for these years for the University are reflected in its website as 8, 10 and 8 in 2016, 2017 and 2018.
Computation for both the graduation and PhD data for AMU is wrong on the site and according to Beg, “it has adversely affected the NIRF rank of the University.”
Beg also highlighted that out of five parameters, AMU has “scored well in four of them.” However, with NIRF’s incorrect data handling, the parameter concerning the university’s ‘Graduation Outcome’ (GO) shows poor outcome. AMU’s press statement has accused NIRF of having “fed wrong data related to the number of PhD completed in AMU in the last session.”
Beg added that “the University will file representation in MHRD/NIRF at the earliest for rectification.”