And we Brazilians are just happy to see that USP and Unicamp got into the list (175 and 177). I do believe, however, that Unicamp got really impressive scores for quality of faculty.
Wow... not one mention of the Indian Institutes of Technology which may just be the toughest engineering schools on the planet. Just have a look at their entrance exams...
High entrance requirements are only one of the factors which define a good university. I'd say that the quality of teaching and the quality of research performed are more important than the quality of incoming students.
The IITs have a good undergraduate program, one of the best in the world. The graduate and research output of the IITs is nowhere as good. In fact , the research in particular is fairly mediocre, compared to say Stanford or MIT.
I went to #70, Nottingham. At the time, it had a reputation for being insanely difficult to get in to study mathematics there, which is why I applied ;-)
And we Brazilians are just happy to see that USP and Unicamp got into the list (175 and 177). I do believe, however, that Unicamp got really impressive scores for quality of faculty.