Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!mit-eddie!bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!hooner
From: hooner@athena.mit.edu.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: rankings of colleges
Message-ID: <1545@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Date: Sat, 3-Oct-87 13:55:50 EDT
Article-I.D.: bloom-be.1545
Posted: Sat Oct  3 13:55:50 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 4-Oct-87 02:35:52 EDT
References: <1503@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <8359@shemp.UCLA.EDU> <625@rocky.STANFORD.EDU> <1449@pdn.UUCP>
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: hooner@athena.mit.edu (Dave Ko)
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lines: 76
Keywords: rankings, colleges

In article <1449@pdn.UUCP> reggie@pdn.UUCP (George W. Leach) writes:
>In article <625@rocky.STANFORD.EDU>, andy@rocky.STANFORD.EDU (Andy Freeman) writes:

>      I agree with Andy.  I have looked at some of the Gourman Reports
>over the past years and also some of the well known Guides to Colleges
>that are issued each year.  If you think about it, rating all of the
>universities in this country is a difficult and time consuming task.
>Given that just how much useful information can be obtained to come 
>up with a fair comparison?


I think that there are certain factors that objectively show how good
a program at a given school is. Yes, you can argue with them, but when
you put a lot of them together, the composite gives a pretty good
indication. A good factor is placement in grad school- the number of
people from undergrad school A that grad school B lets in compared
to the number of people from undergrad school C is a good indication
of what grad school B thinks of A and C. Do this for most schools and
you get a pretty good indication. And by taking a national sample,
you cross-cancel any regional bias.

> And who knows about a program more than
>the students themselves who have gone through one?  At best one can
>hope to find people who have participated in more than one program
>and can make comparisons between them.  But even this has a limited
>value.  You can easily find two people who went to the same university
>in the same department with a wide difference of opinions, due to
>different classes, instructors, etc.... that were encountered within a
>program.

But all that shows is how cocky the students are that go to that school.
Maybe that should be weighted in as one factor, but not much weight
should be given. Now if you ask the students what they think of
other schools ...

>     True, quality of faculty, library, etc.... go a long way towards
>shaping a program, but on what criteria is faculty judged?  In an 
>undergraduate program I feel that teaching ability is far more
>critical than research and publication history.  While at the
>graduate level, where the student needs to be more independent,
>the focus should be on research opportunities.  The later is easier
>to judge than the former.  Teaching ability is a highly subjective
>measure.  What makes an effective teacher?  I'm sure we could
>kick this one around for a while.

Well, I think it's obvious that the way they're going to judge a
faculty is not by things such as teaching ability, which would
be very hard to measure. Instead they're going to look at
tenure, educational background, etc. But quality of faculty could
mean more than just how well they can teach or how much research
or how many journal articles they've written. Even something as
seemingly irrelevant as how well they compose a problem set could
make a big difference. Here at MIT, for example, there are frat
guys who never go to class on Fridays because of hangovers from
Thursday night parties, but because the profs demand so much
in the problem sets and pinpoint the knowledge needed to be gained
from the reading by incorporating many important concepts in a problem,
a student could theoretically never use the teaching ability of the
faculty but still would gain much more than a student at another
university did in a similar course because the prof knew how to make
the student learn the best from the problem set.

>BTW:  In my travels I have found that no matter where people work, live, or
>attend school you can always find people who want to complain, even at the
>most highly thought of places.  Rather than focus on what is the number 1
>school in some subject, I feel the potential student should understand what
>he/she wants in a program and try to find the right match.

I think that's true too. I hope everyone who's been following the net
realizes that these rankings shouldn't neccesarily be given much weight
when deciding on grad schools or even undergrad. There are so many
factors besides how good the department you want to major in happens
to be that would decide whether that school is right.

Dave Ko
hooner@athena.mit.edu