Our worst fears have been confirmed. It was by default that Universiti Malaya made it to the top 100 in last year's Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) world university rankings. The misleading position was due to a case of "mistaken identity". Chinese and Indians at the public universities were wrongly categorised as foreign students, which resulted in UM and USM doing well in this ranking criterion.

This is not shocking news. The Times Good University Guide is an accepted guide on institutions in Britain but it has little experience in ranking universities outside of Britain. This is only the third year that it has conducted such rankings.

As they fine-tune their techniques, I have no doubt UM will find itself slipping further outside the elite group. In fact, in the only other World University Rankings conducted by the Shanghai Jiaotong University, UM ranks outside the top 500.

Although there are discrepancies between methods used to rank universities, some things remain true. Whether it is the Times or Shanghai Jiaotong, the "true" top universities stay strongly positioned.

In both the rankings, MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, Oxford and Cambridge remained in the top 10. Tokyo is constantly in the top 20 and the National University of Singapore in the top 200.

Is University Malaya one of the top learning institutions in the world? Let's be honest with ourselves.