UCT leads SA pack in ranking

UCT is the highest ranked South African and African university, according to a recent survey titled Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), conducted by the Institute of Higher Education at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China. For the purpose of the study, which lists the world's top 500 universities, institutions are ranked using a series of comparable indicators of academic or research performance. These include major international awards won by alumni and staff, highly cited researchers, articles published in Nature and Science, articles in the Science Citation Index-expanded and the Social Science Citation Index, and academic performance with respect to the size of an institution. UCT tops the list of South African universities, which also features the University of the Witwatersrand, the University of KwaZulu-Natal and the University of Pretoria. The only other African university to make it onto the top 500 is the University of Cairo. UCT fell into the 202-301 group. The list, by the way, is once again topped by Harvard in the US, the only institution to score a perfect 100.