<p>Also, Caillebotte’s question wasn’t an ad hominem. I believe that is called “sarcastic humor”.</p>
<p>
It wouldn’t surprise me given the irrational disgust he displays towards it, often veiled as sarcasm.</p>
<p>man
I sure miss the old days when forbes ranked airforce academy as #1</p>
<p>This is absurd.</p>
<p>Cornell is awesome. Its like America’s favorite Ivy besides Harvard. I love Cornell…how could you diss it?</p>
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</p>
<p>see icalculus post #27 above yours (Forbesd is looking at output not input)</p>
<p>"I sure miss the old days when forbes ranked airforce academy as #1 "</p>
<p>I think it was West Point, wasn’t it?</p>
<p>Cornell recruited me for the diving team, but I went somewhere where they had diving boards instead of *******.</p>
<p>It lost some credibility with me when I saw how low UMichigan and UCBerkeley were ranked.</p>
<p>This is truly a WHACK list. Brown #45…listed below Whitman, Wabash, Centre, Colgate, etc. I have suspected for some time that the Forbes list is influenced by something other than intellectual honesty. USNWR is bad enough. Anyone who uses this list for anything but entertainment has simply not done their research. And, no, I am not a Brown alum!</p>
<p>
By “</em></strong>****” you mean bridges, right? That was what you had written before you got cold feet and editted. Diving boards instead of bridges. A joke about students who have recently taken their own lives. What a class act. </p>
<p>Would you be singing the same tune if that was your son or daughter lying broken and dead at the bottom of Fall Creek Gorge? How old are you again, 40, 50, 60?</p>
<p>Michigan changed 108 places in 1 year?</p>
<p>weirdest ranking i’ve ever seen. doesn’t help that the methodology is questionable.</p>
<p>You know what, you guys? There will NEVER be a good system for objectively ranking colleges. That’s just how it is. No matter who does it or how they do it, the vast majority of people are always going to ***** and moan about it. We all need to grow up and get past this idiotic popularity contest. **** Forbes, and **** US News. How about doing your own research, based on what is important to you. For once in your life, just do something <em>radical</em> and FORM YOUR OWN OPINION! I’m so sick of this bickering and nitpicking over why your college is #13, when it should be #12. Do you feel like you are getting the education you want? If so, why does it matter whether your school is ranked 6th or 600th? If not, transfer! </p>
<p>I know it is really easy to get caught up in the competition, I won’t even lie and say I don’t do it sometimes, but the truth is that these rankings (USNWR, at least) have way too much power and too little substance. All they end up doing is either giving people an undeserved sense of pride or outrage, or just making them feel plain bad! Not to mention inspiring colleges to spend so much time finding new ways to cheat, instead of using that time to undertake the longer, more arduous process of actually improving their resources. And you know who suffers for it? The students! If people could just start taking them as seriously as they need to be taken (i.e. not at all), these rankings might finally lose that power. I find it truly appalling that the discussion around education is the one most devoid of any thinking.</p>
<p>The rankings are different, but I wouldn’t say they are off-the-wall. Ten of the top 13 US News LACs are in the top 25 of Forbes (and Middlebury is #26), and 9 of the top 12 US News Universities are there. Whitman and Rice are well-regarded, and it’s nice to see them rise to the top. Don’t know much about the military academies or Centre, but would be interested to hear others speak to that. With the exception of Cornell, the ivies are in the top 50, and this ranking doesn’t factor in prestige. Large schools seem to suffer in these rankings, but many (including Loren Pope) believe that undergraduate teaching is best at smaller schools - at Berkeley, a great institution, our tour guide told us that undergrads watch some of the larger lectures on video when they can’t fit into the lecture hall. That pretty much turned us off to Berkeley until grad school. Since these rankings are new, it’s not surprising that they would still be tweaking parameters, and schools would shift around. But as others have said, it’s nice to see some attempt to measure outputs or value rather than just prestige & selectivity. I agree that RateMyProfessors.com is not a terrific measure, but they seem to be trying to get a measure of teaching, which IMHO, is the main purpose of a college.</p>
<p>Michigan changed 108 places in 1 year? </p>
<p>Yes they did. I guess a couple more students were rated their instructors more favorably this year than last at, “RateMY Professors.com.”</p>
<p>All ranking systems are flawed, and this is no exception. However, the Forbes list is unique in that it ranks all undergraduate institutions together and doesn’t segregate the LAC’s. Who could deny that Williams, Amherst and Swarthmore are among the top 10 best undergraduate schools (I don’t think Princeton belongs in the #2 slot, but probably top 10). There will always be bizarre outliers as all such lists are somewhat capricious (e.g. Reed’s low rank in USNWR). Kudos for a different approach!</p>
<p>I agree with ikemarrus @115. I just visited ratemyprofessor.com and while it was by no means an exhaustive search, a couple of things stand out: 1) this is not an orphaned site; the posts go back a few years but on the most active sites there are plenty of comments from as recently as yesterday, 2) there is some correlation between how active the site is and a school’s overall score. For example, nearly every Wesleyan professor has a listing and the avg score is ~3.5. At the other extreme, Cornell Medical College has only six professors listed and the avg score is 1.5. Dartmouth, which others have said, has a rating system of its own, is missing nearly two thirds of its professors, but still manages a respectable 3+ avg.</p>
<p>Ratemyprofessor may not be a completely accurate measurement of teaching ability at any of these schools, but it may be a surrogate marker for something else: student apathy.</p>
<p>“Who could deny that Williams, Amherst and Swarthmore are among the top 10 best undergraduate schools”</p>
<p>Certainly the general public and many on this board will deny this. The value of a good liberal arts education goes against the preconceived notions of most and therefore, any system that ranks such schools highly must be “silly” or “ridiculous” and “irresponsible.”</p>
<p>GTalum in post #119 was being sarcastic, I hope.</p>