The OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is gaining increasing attention among education authorities of the world. The number of participating economies almost doubled in the past one and a half decades, increasing from 43 in 2000 when it first started to 74 in 2015. PISA assesses the performance in Reading, Mathematics, and Science of 15-year-olds with different emphases rotating among the three subjects in different exercises.The attention of the participating economies has been focused almost exclusively on the ranking results which are used to evaluate the...

World university ranking started one and a half decades ago for the purpose of understanding what makes an excellent institution of higher education. Subsequent to the appearance of the Academic Ranking of World Universities at the Shanghai Jiaotong University, there soon emerged the QS World University Rankings and the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. These three ranking systems are considered the classics as they are the fore-runners, although no less than ten new systems have come to the arena.The various ranking systems adopt a common approach of weight-and-sum to process...