University of Malaya's position in the THE world university rankings
The Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings is a ranking system developed in the UK. I can still vividly remember the inaugural position of University of Malaya (UM) when the list was published in 2004 because I was in the campus. The result was very widely publicized and the celebratory banners were all over the place in the campus. These reactions meant that the Vice Chancellor of the school, Professor Datuk Dr Hashim Yaacob , gave a lot of fucks on this ranking system. He was taking the ranking very seriously and was using it as an absolute measure of the performance of his university. However, when the 2005 list was announced, Dr Hashim was stunned and didn't actually know how to explain the result. Since the new result was not on Dr. Hashim's side, his attitude towards to THE ranking is reversed, and he switched to the don't-give-a-fuck mode. The answer is actually very simple, THE made a mistake in 2004. As suggested by Education ...