<p>Simply give schools that you are familiar with an assessment score (to the tenths place) of 1 to 5. </p>
<p>Peer Assessment, by the way, is essentially your regard of a university's undergraduate strength. </p>
<p>
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A school's peer assessment score is determined by surveying the presidents, provosts, and deans of admissions (or equivalent positions) at institutions in the school's category. Each individual was asked to rate peer schools' undergraduate academic programs on a scale from 1 (marginal) to 5 (distinguished).
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<p>My PA, for example, would be similar to the HS</a> Counselor Rankings, for obvious reasons... ;)</p>
<p>I agree about Minn, and would probably add Tufts, Wake Forest, and Lehigh to the list of schools that are somewhat forgettable. </p>
<p>To me, Tufts is running with the top 25 in terms of student quality and could have a PA of 4.0, along with USC. Notre Dame’s student body is relatively comparable to Gtown’s, and while their reputations are different, they should have comparable PA scores. I think Emory, WUStL, Vandy, Rice, Gtown, Notre Dame, UCLA, and UNC are all worthy of a 4.2 PA. </p>
<p>I am comfortable with the public schools having boosted PA scores from their grad schools, research, and faculty quality, because while those things are less tangible to undergrad students, they do count for something. UVa, for example, is more undergrad-focused (although its med, law, and Darden schools are respectable) and it still manages to garner a 4.3, which suggests that its undergrad quality is quite deserving.</p>
<p>Berkeley at 4.7 and Mich at 4.4 seems fine, because this is just an opinion poll. There are many top-10 level students there, and the schools have public missions divergent from the rest of the top 20, but I still think it would be nice to have a student body to match the all-star faculty. ;)</p>
<p>And, dare I say it, Duke seems to be underachieving a little at #12. Maybe it could up its PA to 4.6. :)</p>
<p>Faculty, research, and quality graduate schools drive an academic department’s distinction more than a cohort of high SAT scoring 18 year-olds.</p>
<p>
PA scores don’t have to match undergraduate selectivity and student body strength. Undergrad selectivity is measured directly by other factors that make up the USNWR ranking. PA scores are a crude attempt to measure the other factors that are important in a research university setting, and most directly correlate to faculty quality and distinction.</p>
<p>Higher PA score schools have more distinguished academic programs and faculty than lower PA score schools. </p>
<p>Schools like Notre Dame and Tufts have strong students, but their faculties are not as strong and they don’t offer any real stand-out, extraordinary (i.e. distinguished) academic programs.</p>
<p>USNEWS PA is not a perfect measure of reputation of colleges. For example, this has a regional bias; scores of colleges in the New England and the Middle Atlantic region are sometimes overestimated while college scores in other region tend to be underestimated. This is simply due to the fact that a HS counselors or college admission officer has to evaluate all the USN-target colleges at the same time and the fact that these respondents are heavily dominated by peoples of the New England and the Middle Atlantic region. Thus, it is a little bit risky to believe the score of each college seriously.</p>
<p>And rightly so. Selectivity matters to ambitious high-schoolers, but clearly, that is irrelevant; we don’t fill-out the PA form. The question I pose, not to you in particular, is something similar to what hawkette touches upon when she says that students learn from their peers. Would you rather have a consistently excellent faculty, or a consistently excellent student body? At the HYPSM level, I would assume that you get both. At the Tufts, Notre Dame level, you get a stellar student body and a very strong, but not exceptional, faculty. At the Wisconsin and Minnesota level, you get distinguished researchers, but a student body one could hardly exchange with Notre Dame’s. </p>
<p>Not only that, in the Michigan-versus-the-world debates, we see quite a few objections about the use of TAs, something high-schoolers seem to despise beforehand, and the actual amount of exposure undergrads get to the star faculty. I am a graduated high-schooler, so I really can’t comment on how much contact students get with distinguished faculty at UCB, UM, or UNC. I think you mentioned elsewhere that you had classes with three or four notable professors at Cal, which is rather impressive, and I really doubt that the classroom experience at Berkeley, from the aspect of teaching quality, is that different from the experience at Columbia, with its huge graduate population.</p>
<p>Yet Berkeley loses [cross</a> admits]( <a href=“http://www.nber.org/papers/w10803.pdf?new_window=1]cross”>http://www.nber.org/papers/w10803.pdf?new_window=1) to Columbia at a fairly high rate. Why? Columbia’s PA is 4.6, but Cal’s is 4.7. Columbia is an Ivy, but Berkeley is the best public school and is very affordable for IS students. More than likely, high-schoolers value selectivity and (unwittingly) yield, over PA, if they even know about that. The student bodies at Cal and Columbia are not that different, but there is a marked uptick in consistency at Columbia, as you know. I can’t speak on why students often prefer privates over publics, but that is the most apparent reason to me. Selectivity is the deciding factor when students choose to attend, for example, Rice over UT or USC over UCLA. Of course, I nearly chose UVa (4.3 PA) over Georgetown (4.1 PA), so this is obviously not universal.
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<p>I agree with you, and you are entirely correct. (In fact, you probably have heard everything I am saying before.) Student selectivity, plus graduation and retention rates, favor private schools with generally wealthier student bodies, and a PA that reflects those metrics again would be unfair to publics. Pitzer and Bowdion have tiny acceptance rates, but I would much rather attend Berkeley. Lehigh and WUStL have strong 75% percentile SAT scores, but I wouldn’t say that they deserve to be more distinguished than Michigan because of it. </p>
<p>I started this thread on a whimsy, and I am only dreaming when I say that Notre Dame, UNC, and UCLA should be shaking hands where PA is concerned. I don’t really want the PA to change, but I still can’t resist some tweaking. Should we bump Cal up to 4.8? :)</p>
<p>I don’t mean that PA scores are quite misleading. It’s not possible for a college’s score to change 4.2 to 3.8 after the POLL. My point is that minuscule adjustment is required sometimes. With plus or minus 0.1 scale, for example, each college’s score should be accurate.</p>
<p>I see. Which PA scores would you change to be more accurate (+/- 0.1)? I assume you have schools like WUStL and USC in mind if you are thinking about East Coast bias.</p>
<p>This brings up a subtle point about school prestige.</p>
<p>Most popular perceptions of prestige are based on the undergraduate selectivity – i.e. the worst students who can get admitted to the school. But some other perceptions of prestige are based on the best students at the school (e.g. when looking at graduate level prestige, or when PhD programs look to admit PhD students from undergraduate origins).</p>
<p>For some schools, there can be a big difference between the two. For example, Arizona State has very low baseline selectivity and therefore little popular prestige, but is considered a worthy school by PhD programs which consider the top students there to be worthy of admission as PhD students.</p>
<p>You are absolutely right. There are top-notch students at many schools, especially Berkeley. If I recall correctly, there are more 1400+ scorers at Berkeley than at Harvard. </p>
<p>However, only looking at the best students is deceiving. The best Howard students can land the same jobs on Wall Street as Harvard grads, but nobody would argue that those two schools have equal prestige. </p>
<p>Rather than the worst or the best, I would think most people look at the median student. This won’t matter to the top students at ASU, because they will be going far anyway. Reed, for example, doesn’t care for rankings and prestige, but its students certainly have no trouble getting into PhD programs.</p>
<p>Looking at the median student may not show the whole story.</p>
<p>Arizona State’s median student (in terms of high school credentials) is probably similar to the median student at San Diego State, Cal Poly Pomona, or UC Riverside. But Arizona State probably has more students at both the low end and at the high end than any of these three state universities in California.</p>
<p>@ #9.
OK I’d like to formalize my hypothesis. 1. Bias across regions as already posted. 2. Bias within the same region (reporters’ marking for the colleges of their region tend to show little differences). Because of these, minuscule adjustments are required.</p>
<p>When HS counselor’s scores are considered (#1 to #22),
Cornell, JHU,CMU and Boston are overestimated,whereas Caltech,Duke, UChiacgo, Rice and WASHU underestimated, IMHO.</p>
<p>Which approach is better? I think it depends on your preference or consideration as follows.</p>
<p>As the gap between the statistic of the best and that of the worst narrows and narrows, two measures of selectivity are approaching to the same level.
In this statistical sense, a smaller variance in the student body of one college is DEFINITELY more desirable than the large variance of a its peer.</p>
<p>But there is another thing regarding this, particularly for top public colleges which show the wide gap between the best and the worst. Since this large variance is also closely related to positive functions of public college education: i) the contribution to expanding SOCIAL benefits of education that state or nation enjoy larger than private benefits that each student enjoy during the life span, ii) the contribution to increasing edu opportunities and improving life conditions of kids from LOW-income households. If this is considered, wide gap between the worst and the best is not bad IMO.</p>
<p>For students who are not close to the median (e.g. students attending reach or safety schools), a wide distribution of student abilities is likely better, in that there will be peer groups at the outlier tails, which may be enough to have course offerings suitable for the outlier tails.</p>
<p>The same may be true for “late bloomer” students whose high school records are relatively poor, but became motivated to achieve highly late (e.g. in senior year, too late to improve their high school records for more selective colleges). Such students may benefit from going to a school with low baseline selectivity that they can get into, but a fat tail at the top of the range of student ability and motivation.</p>
The question I pose, not to you in particular, is something similar to what hawkette touches upon when she says that students learn from their peers. Would you rather have a consistently excellent faculty, or a consistently excellent student body? At the HYPSM level, I would assume that you get both. At the Tufts, Notre Dame level, you get a stellar student body and a very strong, but not exceptional, faculty. At the Wisconsin and Minnesota level, you get distinguished researchers, but a student body one could hardly exchange with Notre Dame’s. </p>