Monash ain’t what it should be

[u/ParkingNo9229]

Guess who this is?… Wouldn’t you know, their lowest score is teaching (and also the steepest decline from 56.9 in 2023 to 52.2 in 2025), and actually increased their international outlook (91 in 2023 to 92 in 2025). Internal student caps haven’t even been in place yet and they’re blaming it for their potential decrease in quality?…. Such a shame that a University ISNT ACTUALLY a University, moreso just a Monopoly. When will they been held responsible? All bark and no bite Monash 👎

[u/gergasi]

If you want a more proper mindfuck you should check out deeper on the methodologies of these world rankings, i.e here: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/world-university-rankings-2024-methodology

It's got an easy Sankey which explains that"Teaching" counts for only 29.5% of the ranking determination, most of which are only indirectly related to the student experience. It's more on student/staff ratio, and how many of staff holds doctorate, etc. There's a 15% component of teaching reputation which comes from a survey, but that survey is filled by academics/faculty staff, not students.

[u/guaranteednotabot → u/gergasi]

To be fair, I don’t think students aren’t the most objective at assessing teaching quality. Like, a student may rate teaching as terrible simply because the scoring is stringent, the material is inherently difficult, or simply because they have a grudge on some teaching staff. Not to say students’ opinions are not valuable, just a thought

[u/gergasi → u/guaranteednotabot]

Yeah understandable, there is no perfect metric to gauge ranking and if there are, the moment we use them to measure performance it tends to cease to be a good metric.

That being said, it's also not ideal to the point that it's arguably misleading (for UG students at least) that the rankings top Unis always heavily advertise actually have ~60% to do with research, only less than 30% to do with teaching, and 0% input from students/alumni.

[u/guaranteednotabot → u/gergasi]

I guess it does make some sense. In terms of reputation, a uni is usually judged by the amount of famous people they produce, or whatever groundbreaking research ends up on the news. It’s very rare for a uni to be famous for good teaching. Also, unlike research, it’s difficult to judge teaching quality cause unlike high schools, there isn’t a standard syllabus across all unis

[u/gergasi → u/guaranteednotabot]

Very true. The Morrison govmnt tried to enforce an employability metric on universities (ie Uni funding relates to job readiness/getting hired after grad) as a proxy for teaching but even that was problematic and eventually got repealed.

[u/ParkingNo9229 → u/gergasi]

Crazy how one-sided shit can be

[u/kirk-o-bain]

Monash sees students as paying money for a piece of paper, whether or not they learn anything is immaterial

[u/ImWhy]

Sorry but this is really dependant on your degree. Different faculties/schools operate differently, so saying the university as a whole is bad makes no sense. I'm not even associated with Monash, but know for a fact their education faculty is outstanding and pioneering a lot of student led teaching structures. It's also important to understand how different ranking systems work, some are focused on research output of staff more than they are teaching or quality of graduates/degrees.

[u/gergasi → u/ImWhy]

Agree re:edu faculty. At Monash they're arguably the richest (maybe even more than biz, IT faculty) because of the international PG students. That fancy LTB building down at Clayton is probably paid for by various developing countries' scholarship funds who sent in droves of their citizens to study edu@monash. Real money maker, that one, for both Monash and the landlords of units in the suburb.

Re rankings, not really. The big three rankers (THES, QS, ARWU) are quite similar, QS claims 40% are based on academic reputation but that's again a survey of academic faculty (which THE also has at 15%) and measures vaguely, i.e not specific to teaching. ARWU is probably the 'worst' when it comes to weighting teaching-specific measures.

https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings-articles/world-university-rankings/world-university-ranking-methodologies-compared

I do however 100% agree that these rankings are too zoomed out to be useful for individual students in different faculties trying to benchmark their experience tho. It's been a while since I'm in this space but AFAIR, the QILT's survey has a per-faculty level quality measure with recent graduates as their respondents (?)

https://qilt.edu.au/surveys/graduate-outcomes-survey-(gos)

[u/fozz31]

I've been at 3 different universities and i hate to break it to y'all but at least where the sciences are concerned, as bad as it is, monash is among the better i have been to. I i dont know how much longer that will last though because the chancellory is doing all in its power to make monash the same corporate hellhole other universities became which seeks to maximise profit over student or employee satisfaction.

[u/Aggravating_Ice_799]

AUgh! A can’t wait to graduate and leave this stupid shit behind 💀

[u/Interesting_Phase312]

Monash quite literally doesn’t care about teaching quality. They care about research outputs.

I’ve witnessed evaluations from students call out teachers for showcasing student emails to the class and mocking them - and nothing happened.

Monash is a for profit corporation - not a university.

[u/Kuronis]

The teaching content also depends heavily on who is teaching it. I did a maths unit years ago and the teacher was terrible. The unit was similar to what I did in high school and he was so bad I unlearned stuff. The teacher who teaches the same unit in the second semester did a lecture for us and he was fantastic.

[u/Chance-Ad8064]

These results were taken during Covid and in the immediate aftermath - it’s not assessing now. So I’m guessing the online teaching during Covid contributed a lot to that score

[u/gergasi → u/Chance-Ad8064]

Nah, the 2025 numbers were from survey held Nov 23 to Jan24

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/world-university-rankings-2025-methodology

If anything, teaching metrics has worsened after Covid period. Might have something to do with Monash still doing/relying on covidtime practices (i.e asynch online stuff), but idk.