Math Rankings: is this accurate?

[GreedIsGood]

<p>Only thing that matters:</p>

<p>Princeton>Harvard>MIT</p>

[rjkofnovi]

<p>^^^^Where is Duke on the math list?</p>

[collegehelp]

<p>^I arbitrarily used only the schools ranked 1-20 by US News (23 schools). Duke was ranked 24th by US News so it was not included.</p>

[JohnAdams12]

<p>fallenchemist, we are not talking UCLA here. We are talking Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and MIT.</p>

<p>and we are not talking about picking a school because a teacher wrote one book that is used in the department. We are talking about YOU specifically stating that an undergraduate student will learn the same in a class using a certain book in which the professor had nothing to do with the book versus one taught by the highly regarded Professor that wrote the book used in the class.</p>

<p>

JohnAdams - There may be, occassionally, one prof within a department that wrote a book that is in wide use for undergraduate teaching. But in any case, would I not go to UCLA as a chem major because no professor there has written a book used in the classroom? Or pick a school I think is overall a “lesser” school because someone there wrote a book that became a hit in the classroom? I definitely don’t get the reasoning there.

</p>

[JohnAdams12]

<p>GreedISGood, actually, based on the table put up in #40 for Math rankings, it would be more like:</p>

<p>Princeton
UC Berkekley
Harvard/MIT</p>

[fallenchemist]

<p>collegehelp - Unfortunately you start with the false premise that one can rank undergraduate departments at all, much less like graduate programs. There is virtually zero correlation between the graduate school experience and the undergrad. That, in fact, is a huge amount of my point. Again, you have never answered the questions of how the administration can be quantified to numerical precision, how age makes any difference other than possibly new programs (to which I gave a refutation) and other factors.</p>

<p>In graduate school one is concerned nearly exclusively with research and original work, so number of papers, awards, reputation, things like that make a huge difference. That is very far from the undergrad mission. Just because the USNWR graduate rankings agree with the Gourman report means absolutely nothing, other than perhaps his methodology was rigged to make it come out that way or, more likely, he used flawed factors as to what constitutes the quality of an undergraduate department.</p>

[JohnAdams12]

<p>fallenchemist, it seems that the USNWR rankings are provided both for graduate and undergraduate schools by department in the field of Engineering.</p>

<p>Take some time and research these rankikngs and tell us if there is some correlation between the Undergraduate and Graduate departmental results</p>

<p>

collegehelp - Unfortunately you start with the false premise that one can rank undergraduate departments at all, much less like graduate programs. There is virtually zero correlation between the graduate school experience and the undergrad. That, in fact, is a huge amount of my point. Again, you have never answered the questions of how the administration can be quantified to numerical precision, how age makes any difference other than possibly new programs (to which I gave a refutation) and other factors.</p>

<p>In graduate school one is concerned nearly exclusively with research and original work, so number of papers, awards, reputation, things like that make a huge difference. That is very far from the undergrad mission. Just because the USNWR graduate rankings agree with the Gourman report means absolutely nothing, other than perhaps his methodology was rigged to make it come out that way or, more likely, using flawed factors as to what constitutes the quality of an undergraduate department.

</p>

[fallenchemist]

<p>I already explicitly stated that engineering and architecture are exceptions, because here one takes a much higher proportion of one’s courses in that major. While people get graduate degrees in those areas (and I don’t mean M.Arch), it is not nearly as common as most other areas. Still, I would like to know the methodology used to rank those undergrad engineering programs. I don’t have the inclination to research it though.</p>

<p>Actually, as much as I disagree with ranking systems in this area (undergraduate) at all, it might just be rather telling that even USNWR, which makes a fortune off this scam, chooses not to try to rank undergraduate departments in history, biology, chemistry, etc. etc. Although if they figure out a way to make it sound even remotely credible, I am sure they will try.</p>

[JohnAdams12]

<p>fallenchemist, if you took the time to research it, you would find that the undergraduate departmental engineering rankings are made by the head of the departments at the engineering schools. The same heads that see these undergraduate students apply and enroll at their own graduate school engineering departments.</p>

<p>

collegehelp - Unfortunately you start with the false premise that one can rank undergraduate departments at all, much less like graduate programs. There is virtually zero correlation between the graduate school experience and the undergrad. That, in fact, is a huge amount of my point. Again, you have never answered the questions of how the administration can be quantified to numerical precision, how age makes any difference other than possibly new programs (to which I gave a refutation) and other factors.</p>

<p>In graduate school one is concerned nearly exclusively with research and original work, so number of papers, awards, reputation, things like that make a huge difference. That is very far from the undergrad mission. Just because the USNWR graduate rankings agree with the Gourman report means absolutely nothing, other than perhaps his methodology was rigged to make it come out that way or, more likely, using flawed factors as to what constitutes the quality of an undergraduate department.

</p>

[fallenchemist]

<p>John - sorry to be dense, but I have no idea what you said.</p>

[JohnAdams12]

<p>fallen, example for USNWR undergraduate Engineering rankings by department:</p>

<p>the head of the department of Chemical Engineering at MIT has a vote for the ranking of the ChE undergraduate departments at all the colleges.</p>

<p>the head of the department of Civil Engineering at Stanford has a vote for the ranking of the Civil undergraduate departmetns at all the colleges.</p>

<p>and so on…</p>

[fallenchemist]

<p>Ah, OK. So totally based on peer assessment?</p>

[Sam_Lee]

<p>^Yes…</p>

[rjkofnovi]

<p>What do the heads of engineering departments know about other school’s engineering departments? I can hear the argument starting.</p>

[rjkofnovi]

<p>What a silly idea to ask department heads. I mean SAT scores of students should tell us how good of an engineering department a university has.</p>

[fallenchemist]

<p>OK, so back to the Gourman report. I did some checking and found there was an article published in the journal titled Higher Education by David S. Webster of the University of Pennsylvania. I believe this is the article that collegehelp refers to when he says:

@collegehelp

I think the criticisms of the Gourman report originated from an article written by a librarian in the late 1980s and they have been parroted by many since then.

So apparently not “just” (my characterization) a librarian and as I will detail, it is extensively researched, including interviews with Gourman himself.</p>

<p>So to start, I have no fear of bias when I say he completely eviscerates the Gourman report. Going right to the conclusion, he states

@David Webster

It is time for students, faculty members, administrators, librarians, book reviewers, and scholars to stop believing that Gourman’s ratings measure college and university quality.

There are far more criticisms than I can detail here, so I will stick with the highlights.</p>

<p>

@David Webster

The bizarre features of this book include the following: 1. Gourman was exceptionally vague about what data he used and how he analyzed them, to the point where it is impossible to know what his procedures were, much less to replicate them. 2. He was also silent about who helped him with his book and how. In his preface he said that many people had furnished him with information: “In an undertaking of a multi-dimensional study that is dependent on the cooperation of a large number of persons, obligations are incurred which cannot be acknowledged individually. Since such a list is far too long to include here, I simply acknowledge my great debt to the faculty members, administrators, college and university presidents for their assistance in many ways” (Gourman, 1967, p. viii). But it is far from certain that Gourman received such information from so many people. At least, no one who has reviewed the 1967 Gourman Report - and, for that matter, no one who has reviewed any of Gourman’s eight books - has ever been able to find a single college or university administrator, faculty member, or student who recalls ever having been contacted for information by letter, phone, or in-person visit by Gourman or any employee, agent, or assistant of Gourman

He goes on to say in the next point that the overall university rankings make no sense, with schools like Kansas being rated higher than Smith, Middlebury, and a number of other USNWR highly ranked LAC’s. I think we can all agree that while ranking systems can certainly have legitimate differences, it would be hard to find many people that would have put Kansas above these schools ever. Oklahoma State was ranked higher than Vassar and Bowdoin.</p>

<p>In another edition, the following is noted:

@David Webster

In his ratings of departments, Gourman seems to have tried, towards the front of the book, for some realism, and thus he provided - as one might expect to find in a carefully done report - some tie scores among departments and some skipping of integers in the ratings of programs. For example, in the case of French departments, Gourman’s top-rated institutions scored, respectively, on his 5-point scale, 4.96,4.91,4.90,4.86, and 4.81. Three of his French departments were tied for seventh place at 4.70, and fully five were tied for tenth at 4.62 (Gourman, 1977, p. 38). But further along in the book Gourman eschewed even this small amount of versimilitude and began to list departments without any ties at all and with every school scoring exactly 0.01 lower than the next higher-rated one - for example, 4.88,4.87,4.86, 4.85, 4.84, etc. - so that frequently for 20 or 30 departments in a row there were no ties and no integers skipped. Thus in the case of law schools, Gourman listed 50 in a row in perfect descending order, from 3.50 to 3.01, with no ties (Gourman, 1977, pp. 97-98). Then he reeled off 40 more law schools, again with no ties and without skipping integers, from 2.90 to 2.51 (Gourman, 1977, pp. 98-99). When, in my interview with Gourman, I asked about these unusual patterns, he told me that in his preliminary calculations, which he carried out to several decimal places, his rating did not look nearly so “neat.” But his publisher made him round off his data to two decimal places, and when he did so, he noticed that he was left with long columns of numbers where no schools were tied and where no integers were skipped. He was surprised by this coincidence, he said, but as a responsible social scientist he could not, of course, alter his data just because they looked suspicious.

In the history of human endeavor data has never come out like that, lol.</p>

<p>Webster goes on to note that in another case where he is comparing universities world-wide, he changes the “numerically precise” results associated with many universities without explanation. In fact, despite various requests, Gourman apparently refused to share his methodology. Along these lines Webster notes:

@David Webster

Gourman’s 1980 book on graduate programs was similar to his 1977 and 1980 books on undergraduate programs, with one important exception. In rating graduate departments, Gourman provided four sub-scores, in “curriculum,” “faculty instruction,” “faculty research,” and “library resources”; in rating professional schools, he added a fifth sub-score, in “administration.” An institution’s overall rating, on his usual 5-point scale, was the simple average of its ratings in the four or five sub-scores. Astonishingly enough, throughout the book, every single institution had exactly the same ordinal position in all four (or five) of these sub-scores as its overall rank. That is, if a school’s English department was ranked eighth overall, it was ranked eighth in all four sub-scores; if its law school was ranked 25th, it was ranked 25th in all five sub-scores, and so on. One might expect that a department might occasionally - indeed, very frequently - be ranked higher in one area than another. One could expect that an economics department, for example, might have the eleventh best curriculum, the 38th best faculty instruction, the 49th best faculty research, and the 23rd best library resources in Gour- man’s sample. But that was never the case, even once, in the entire book, despite the fact that Gourman covered 58 separate academic disciplines and professional programs and that he usually rated 20 or 30 institutions, and occasionally more than 50 institutions, for each discipline. When I asked Gourman during our interview about this truly extra- ordinary arrangement of his data, he said that he, too, was surprised by how the figures came out, but that as a responsible investigator he did not have the privilege of monkeying with his statistics, no matter how suspicious they looked.

</p>

<p>Finally, there is this:

@David Webster

Shortly after this rating was published, many college administrators, especially those at liberal arts colleges, questioned Gourman’s accuracy, and Gourman’s responses to those who asked him about his work did not always serve to reassure them. A Chronicle of Higher Education writer who asked Gourman why he had not “explained his research methods more clearly” met with this response: “it could be confusing to put in too much about how it is done. It is not scientific to include so much information” (Watkins, 1984, p. 13).

Excuse me??? Not scientific to include your methodology? I hope we can all agree with Dr. Webster’s opinion which I quoted first.</p>

[rjkofnovi]

<p>^^^This is probably why there hasn’t been a new Gourman report in years! I agree with fallenchemist when it comes to those reports.</p>

[bclintonk]

<p>

@fallenchemist

Unfortunately you start with the false premise that one can rank undergraduate departments at all, much less like graduate programs. There is virtually zero correlation between the graduate school experience and the undergrad.

</p>

<p>Apart from the fact that you take classes from the same professors? And sometimes take the very same classes as the grad students? I think in a field like math, at least for for the most gifted and highest-achieving students with ambitions to go far in the field, graduate department rankings very closely approximate the desirability of undergrad schools. Look, for the very top math students, most LACs simply won’t offer enough higher math to present an intellectual challenge; they just don’t have the faculty for it (and there are plenty of threads on CC where that point has been made). If you’re rocketing through the undergrad math curriculum, you want to be someplace that has a strong graduate program so you can start taking graduate-level classes by the time you’re a junior and senior. And you’re going to want to take classes from and develop relationships with some of the top people in the field, people doing cutting-edge research who can mentor you and steer you in that direction. Many top mathematicians make their greatest intellectual breakthroughs at an early age. If you think there’s any chance you might be in that category, you want to put yourself in a position to advance as far and as fast as you possibly can in the field. And that means you don’t want to waste your time at an undergrad institution that doesn’t have the intellectual resources to take you to the very top of the field in a hurry, if it turns out that you really are capable of going there.</p>

[fallenchemist]

<p>I agree with you bclintonk, and I have stated on other threads that if one is a math prodigy this is the case. I no doubt should have made the same disclaimer here, but I don’t think I did. But that is the highly unusual case, and 99+% of students that are math majors are not doing high level research or expected to come up with original proofs as undergrads, even for honors theses, or even rocketing through all the classes. If it makes it more palatable, I will rephrase my statement from “virtually no correlation” to “little correlation in the vast majority of cases”, and certainly not enough of an overlap in the two experiences to use the grad rankings to make a choice. In the end, except for a relative handful of students, it gets back to the fact that the whole purpose of being an undergrad, not to mention the experience, is quite different than being a highly subject focused grad student.</p>

<p>Also, I think it would be rare for someone to only find out in college they are this kind of prodigy. Possible, sure, but it would be so exceptional it doesn’t merit basing a discussion around in this kind of forum, given what was asked. So I think 99.9% of that 0.001% of prodigies that would “rocket through” and all wouldn’t need to ask at this point where they should be going.</p>

[JohnAdams12]

<p>rjk, my friend…I assume that you are kidding here, right?</p>

<p>

What do the heads of engineering departments know about other school’s engineering departments? I can hear the argument starting.

</p>