The British higher education survey company Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) published the 2011 QS Asian University Rankings on May 23rd. NTHU achieved an overall ranking at 31^th, which is an improvement of 3 places as compared to that of 2010. President Lih-J Chen was delighted and praised everyone at the university for their hard work to achieve such an outstanding result.

President Chen also spoke about the improvement NTHU has made since the first QS Asian University Rankings was published in 2009. NTHU achieved a ranking of 40 in that rankings; the result has been improving year on year. Whilst this achievement should be celebrated, President Chen pointed out that ranking is not the only indicator of a university's performance; therefore, NTHU shall continue to improve the quality of its education, and work harder toward becoming a top university at the global level.

The performance indicators adopted by QS this year include academic reputation, faculty-student ratio, average number of papers published by each faculty member, number of citations per paper, proportion of international faculty, and proportion of international students and exchange students. NTHU performed particularly well in the average number of papers published category, achieving 7th place among Asian universities. However, faculty-student ratio proved to be a weakness of NTHU. Compared with other performance indicators, faculty-student ratio is one of the areas most difficult to improve upon, due to the constraints imposed by the overall higher education system in Taiwan.

QS also published the ranking results for world university performance in the Life Sciences & Medicine category in last April. For Medicine, NTHU achieved a ranking between 151 and 200. In addition, NTHU's performance in 'Citations per Paper' is the best among all universities in Taiwan. Life Sciences & Medicine Rankings are the latest in a series of rankings used to highlight the performance of top universities. Compared with others in this category, NTHU as a medium-size university without a college or department specifically focused on the discipline of medicine, nevertheless gained a place within the top 200 rankings purely on the strength of life science and medicine related publications.

In the area of Engineering and Technology, NTHU received a ranking between 101 and 150 in each of the subject categories of Computer Science and Information Systems, Chemical Engineering, and Mechanical, Aeronautical & Manufacturing Engineering; for Electrical and Electronic Engineering, NTHU ranked between 151 and 200.

The first ever Cross-Strait Quad-Regional University Rankings were also recently published by Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Again, NTHU achieved an impressive ranking of the fourth place among all universities ranked. Although we were ranked lower than Tsinghua University in Beijing, National Taiwan University, and The University of Hong Kong; NTHU outperformed these three top universities in many categories and subject rankings. For instance, NTHU achieved the best average mark for the number of articles published, articles in English, and international patents produced by faculty. Furthermore, but, we has the highest number and ratio of full-time faculty who have a doctoral degrees; and the highest number of graduates who have won Nobel prize in Science (for physics, chemistry, biology and medicine, and economics) or Fields Medals.