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Engineering students of BME GPK get snapped up before graduation
2016. 10. 13.One of the world-renowned ranking companies once again placed BME’s mechanical engineering school among the world’s best 300.
This year BME’s mechanical engineering study programme is at the 258th place in the latest ranking of the National Taiwan University Ranking (NTU) as the only engineering school from Hungary. ˮLast year we didn’t manage to make into the top 300 institutions, so in recent years, this has been our best resultˮ, Tibor Czigány, member of MTA, dean of BME GPK told bme.hu. The engineering degree programmes of BME GPK occupied the 294th place in 2013 and the 300th place in 2014. NTU Ranking is among the renowned and recognised ones of the world’s university rankings.
Apart from the mechanical engineering school of the University of Ljubljana no other technical universities from the neighbouring countries, including the technical universities of Vienna or Bratislava, are featured among the top 300. Looking farther we will find no Czech or Italian institutions on the list. BME’s mechanical engineering school even came ahead of institutions like the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Kaiserslautern, and Trinity College Dublin, etc. Other than BME the Faculties of Medicine and Pharmacy of Semmelweis University and the Faculty of Physics of Loránd Eötvös University are the only Hungarian schools in the top 300 of the subject-related ranking.
ˮThis rank is the outcome of an 8 to 10-year effortˮ, Tibor Czigány summarized the result, adding that they continuously improve the level of education. ˮThe faculty members fulfill more and more academic requirements, they obtain scientific qualifications, and become doctors of MTA. Another important factor in our progress is that the faculty’s budget now caters for the recognition of quality academic performance, which in turn has influenced the work of the departments. Our staff have achieved results and written quality papers appearing in the world’s leading scientific journals with great impact factors, thus generating numerous citations in the space of a few years. We hope to achieve even better results in the coming years.”
As far as the regional results are concerned there are only two institutions among the top 200: the Warsaw University of Technology occupies the 171st place, while the aforementioned University of Ljubljana is at the 173rd place. Aside from BME there are only Polish higher education institutions of technology (the Wroclaw University of Technology at the 249th, the Silesian University of Technology in Gliwice at the 258th, and the AGH University of Science and Technology in Krakow at the 295th places) among the top 300.
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NTU’s ranking, published as Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Council of Taiwan (HEEACT) between 2007 and 2010, evaluates the performance of the universities based on their scientific papers (number of quality papers, number of citations, h-index, number of highly cited papers). As the ranking is based solely on the assessment of said papers, the result is a good indicator of the scientific research done at the universities in terms of research productivity, research impact, and research excellence, which has a profound effect on the quality of education, too. The list ranks the best 500 universities (overall ranking), and the top 300 universities in six fields and fourteen subjects. Of the more than 4000 scientific institutions (universities and research institutions) listed in the database (Essential Science Indicators, ESI) the assessment relies on, at first 900 institutions are selected based on the number of published articles and citations (editor’s note: ESI is a comprehensive compilation of science performance statistics and science trends data, where information is based on journal article publication counts and citation data from Thomson Scientific databases (Web of Science, Journal Citation Reports) This year’s overall ranking is topped again by US universities (Harvard, Stanford, etc.), while the ranking in the subject of mechanical engineering is led by Asian insitutions together with American ones. |
ˮWe feel under pressure to ensure the effectiveness of the education while not compromising elite education. We cannot accept more students as we are approaching our capacity ceiling. On the other hand, if we lower our admission standards, the quality of our graduates will suffer, though it’s clear that we admit the best students in Hungary. We are proud to be the second most popular in the higher education choices of the most excellent high school students (editor’s note: the first being Corvinus University’s international business programme, the third Semmelweis University’s medical programme), which means that it is not only our faculty members that are getting better but also our students”, elaborated the dean of GPK. ˮWe have a degree programme that only accepts students with multiple language certificates and an advanced level high school certificate. That is the mechatronics engineering programme where there are 110 to 120 students in each year. Admission to the rest of our mechanical engineering programmes also requires 100 to 120 points more than admission to similar programmes of other Hungarian universities.”
ˮIndustrial partners acknowledge our results, our graduates are especially sought after as design engineers. There is a competition for our students, sometimes we cannot cover the needs”, emphasized the head of GPK adding that their students get snapped up well before graduation.
TJ-BK
Photo: János Philip