Preparing a league table is thankless task, since, with the exception of the leaders, everyone on the list is likely to be unhappy with the results. It gets even harder if you try to rank institutions according to a combination of factors. You get several winners, of course, but it also become clear, how hard it is to find the common denominator linking statistics from diverse sources.

For those who will be making university applications in coming months, it is essential to know whether their time and money will be well spent at a given institution. The decision is made even harder by the current Bologna reforms – the next academic year will be different in every way from this year. HVG's league table is meant to help candidates choose between institutions, providing more than 60 different tables, to avoid accusations of oversimplification.

There will also be information about entrance exams and about the courses on offer. But entrance criteria will not be a factor in the rankings. One reason for this is that institutions have little say over their entrance requirements – they develop as a result of political compromises. The other reason is that everything will change with the new "two cycle" system of university education, and so working out which college will have the toughest entrance criteria next year will be a matter of guesswork.

The guiding principle was that the ranking should reflect teaching quality, assessed using precise data. We will not be considering employers' views of a given university department's course offerings.

But we are interested in the ratio of professors, assistant professors, lecturers and teaching assistants in each department. We want to know how many of the teachers speak foreign languages, the average number of academic articles per teacher, and in student-teacher ratios.