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QS Overall Rankings

QS Overall Rankings

The QS World University Rankings is an annual publication of university rankings by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS). In 2018, the QS published their 15th edition of the QS World University Ranking Results 2018/19. Previously known as THE-QS World University Rankings, the publisher had collaborated with Times Higher Education magazine (THE) to publish its international league tables from 2004 to 2009 before both started to announce their own versions. QS then chose to still use the pre-existing methodology while THE adopted a new one. 

The QS World University Rankings ranked over 1000 universities from over 80 countries.  The rankings are based on opinions of over 80,000 academics, 40,000 employer responses as well as 13 million research papers and 66 million citations. The QS introduced faculty area normalisation in 2015 to ensure that institutions specialising in Life Sciences and Natural Sciences were not unduly advantaged. 

QS Rankings

NUI Galway has steadily risen in the QS (Quacquarelli Symonds) World University Ranking in the 2011-2017 period.  In the 2017/2018 results, NUI Galway reached a rank of 243 and made it to the top 1%  of the universities in the world. Although the 2018/19 QS Ranking results reflected poorly for Irish Universities and NUI Galway has fallen slightly to a rank of 260, NUI Galway continues to perform strongly in the International scores. 


Table 1: NUI Galway's Ranking result 2011-2018.

QS Ranking Chart 2018 with MIT‌‌

QS Metrics

 The QS overall university ranking use six metrics in total.

Two of the metrics (Academic Reputation and Employer Reputation) are based on surveys conducted by the QS. These surveys are carried out on a population of over 70,000  academics and 35,000 employers.  See more details on how the QS calculates these surveys and the other core metrics used below.

Table 2: The QS Rankings Metrics

QS Weighting