<ol>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>MIT</li>
<li>Princeton</li>
<li>Yale</li>
<li>Brown</li>
<li>Columbia</li>
<li>Cornell</li>
<li>Stanford</li>
<li>Caltech</li>
<li>Dartmouth</li>
<li>Duke</li>
<li>Georgetown</li>
<li>Johns Hopkins</li>
<li>Northwestern</li>
<li>UC Berkley</li>
<li>UPenn</li>
<li>Carnegie Mellon</li>
<li>U Chicago</li>
<li>UVA</li>
<li>Rice</li>
<li>UM Ann Arbor</li>
<li>UNC Chapel Hill</li>
<li>Notre Dame</li>
<li>WUSTL</li>
</ol>
<p>Harvard-Yale: 4.9
Brown-Stanford: 4.8
Caltech-UPenn: 4.7
Carnegie Mellon-UVA: 4.6
Rice-WUSTL: 4.5</p>
<p>I thought that some of this ranking list was ridiculous (not the top schools but as a whole)</p>
<p>It certainly shows how ignorant high school counselors are! Of course, nearly everyone here already knows this from their own experiences.</p>
<p>Do the counselors judge all schools, or just schools within say a 500 mile radius? Because the idea of my counselor in Texas judging a school like Dartmouth seems ridiculous, especially since no one in the four years I was in high school ever went to Dartmouth.</p>
<p>Well, if you don’t know a school well enough, don’t judge. It would be completely ridiculous for a guidance counselor to give his/her opinion on a school which he or she has no intimate knowledge or past working experience with…</p>
<p>I’m assuming this fundamental criteria is already built into mail-in survey questionnaire.</p>
<p>But Phead, in the average high school, most counselors have very little experience with the top schools. For instance, when I went to a public high school, maybe one person a year went to a top school, and there were five counselors. That means that if a counselor has 20 years experience at that school, he probably will have had about 4 students heading to top schools. But even if you have all 4 of those heading to the same school, so what? You have exactly FOUR experiences with a school, which certainly isn’t enough to make any accurate judgments. So they judge by reputation alone. This is pretty much a ‘public perception’ rating among semi-informed people more than anything.</p>
<p>Assuming being the operable word.</p>
<p>I just feel that somethings awry when UT and A&M receive the same score, even though it’s almost universally accepted in Texas that UT is a better school academically. </p>
<p>When I look at the counselor’s rankings, I always find it odd when schools that I don’t think are particularly strong are ranked the same or higher than a school I’m fond of, UT. Kansas and UT are peer schools? Really?</p>