Every year parents wait eagerly for the schools ranks to be published in leading dailies to get an idea about the top schools for their child’s admission. These ranking are based on survey of the reputed schools which wish to participate and let themselves evaluated on various parameters.
But do the rankings and scores of the schools that come out of the rigorous analysis really give the correct picture? Is the analysis truly statistically correct?
In my blog I am trying to find out if the school ranking is truly unbiased and right. The data has been taken from the 2014 Schools ranking from Education World (educationworld.in)
The bar chart below shows the coeff of determination between Total Score with the various parameters.
It is evident Teachers Welfare and Development, Leaderhip Quality Management and Lifeskills account for more than 70% of variation in Final Score while an important parameter like AcadReputation has the least contribution towards the Final Score.
Further exploration of the correlation coefficient between various parameters is shown below:
The table below shows the correlation coefficients between various parameters. Green color means high correlation while red means low correlation
Looking at the R between various parameters we see that the following are highly are correlated:
- TeachersWD vs FacultyCompetence: r = 0.703
- TeachersWD vs LifeSkills r = 0.74
- TeachersWD vs Internationalism: r = 0.729
- LeadMgmt vs LifeSkills r = 0.706
- Cocurrics vs Sport : r = 0.726
Since Teachers Welfare and Development is correlated to at least three other parameters, this is resulting in scores biased favorably towards the schools which score high on Teachers Welfare and Development. An unbiased scores can be calculated only when the various parameters do not have high correlation among themselves.
In order to remove this bias in ranking we retained only the parameters which have low correlation coeff. among them. The table below shows various parameters which have have low correlation coefficient among themselves. These are:
- Value for Money
- Sports
- ParentsInvolvement
- IndividualAttention
- FacultyCompetence
- AcadsReputation
We recommend that the overall score based on the such parameters as have relatively low correlation among themselves so that the overall score of any school is unbiased.
My next blog is on the analysis and various categories of schools based on their scores.
