However, are there large enough student surveys for courses and instructors across entire schools, much less across different schools, that can be used as a comparison?
Also, note that students generally do not take courses with the same content at multiple schools to allow comparison, with the exception of college frosh repeating their high school AP courses. Even in the latter case, the comparison is muddied by the differences between high school and college, and that a student seeing the material a second time may have a different perspective on teaching quality than one seeing it the first time.
I’ve noted before that Niche doesn’t really survey this in a helpful way, which is rather unfortunate.
I’m not aware of anyone else doing it either.
My two cents is if a college got a good score given the US News methodology for this issue, that is interesting information. And I think good scores should be thought of generously, because they cut across a lot of universities and colleges.
If a university or college got no score, or a score you think is too low–that might not be very interesting.
In a zero-sum rankings mindset, this makes no sense. But from my perspective, it is fine for this sort of thing to only go from positive down to just neutral, and not into actually bad.
Like a lot of the discussions here is about who should be in the top 50 and who should not. Leaving that aside, isn’t the data that us news collects still useful? You can go research Montana State University on usn and come to your own conclusions on whether it is worth it to study there?
My point is you can ignore the ranking and the weights and just look at the data compiled: majors offered, graduation rate, diversity and whatever else you are interested in for all universities in one place.
Problem is, every school says that. Is the peer assessment survey supposed to rate which school sounds the most sincere?
If not, how do administrators of a school know about the teaching quality of other schools, when there are hundreds of schools each having hundreds/thousands of professors?
This reminds me of the Coaches Poll in college football, where coaches or their assistants attempt to rank football teams using highlights or box scores, without actually watching the games. School administrators don’t even have box scores to look at.
That would be more true if the information was free. Unfortunately you need to pay $41 to see most on the useful information about colleges on USNWR. There are other sources of information that are free such as the CDS, IPEDS/CollegeNavigator, CollegeScorecard, the individual college websites, this forum, etc.
And that’s definitely something to keep in mind when someone touts the #3 ranked Mechanical Engineering program or #5 ranked Computer Science program or whatever here! (and it’s almost invariably engineering or CS).
This is why my son was maybe right and me not so. He didn’t care. I did.
My favorite though is my alma mater beating Harvard. You take what you can get.
Unfortunately we are tied with the school that 36 years ago took us down in the final seconds of the 1987 ncaa hoops championship. Hex Keith Smart wherever you are.
In terms of assessing the quality of instruction, there’s the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). It’s a survey that students respond to regarding “academic rigor, interactions with professors, and active and collaborative learning.” Getting high marks from students for these areas could give some kind of a measure on instructional quality. Again, the feds could require this survey as well for schools that receive federal funding, and it could help promote the use of best teaching practices amongst professors as well as colleges might start caring more about the results if it’s being reported publicly and (perhaps) being used in well-known colllege rankings.
*Quote is from the second edition of Lynn O’Shaughnessy’s The College Solution
The thing about 61A is that it is a technical class for most engg majors, not just EECS. So the % of grads taking 61A as a required class is much higher. Same goes for many of the LS majors. And then you’ve had a historical pool of CS and DS intended people who take 61A and then decide not to do 61B or 70 because they are so far behind the declaration gpa targets.
So back of envelope math - assume 8k per class. Out of these about 20% graduate with a CS/EECS degree. Then you add DS, Cog ScI, ORMS, non EECS COE majors + the groups of people who gave up on CS declaration after taking the classes. And you still have other stem majors like Math and Applied Math who take that class because it’s a famous class. It’s not hard to see the #s approaching 50%.
Earlier your claim was that “CS/DS/EECS accounts for a majority of degrees granted”. That’s not true. Those majors account for about 19% of all undergrad degrees at Cal.
Now your claim is that close to 50% of the student body takes a particular intro CS class? I’m not sure that is relevant to anything said previously, but in any case, I think that figure is inflated.
On a side note: do any other universities who supposedly have “borrowed” the curriculum for the class use an army of undergraduates as the teaching assistants, or is that just a Cal thing?
In looking through the new rankings, I could not make any sense as to why Hillsdale is now ranked the same as Denison, Pitzer and Kenyon at #39. Hillsdale moved up from 48th last year. Given some of the metrics like Pell Grant recipient outcomes have to work against them since they don’t take federal dollars. Their acceptance rate has gotten lower than in past at 20% with really high admission yield rates of 62% for a T40 school, but I did not see how that would cause their rankings to go up. The also did not seem to have high marks on many of the other ranking such as teaching, research, etc and got listed as a #92 value school which does not justify a 9 point rise in rank. I can’t make sense of why they went up.
Oh wow, you got me. If you followed the thread you would know that the entire discussion about class size is mainly due to a couple of lower div CS classes that one of the posters mentioned. And I’m providing reasons for why there is such a demand for that course.
Also on the curriculum front, I’m not making it up. This is from an LA times article on the new college of CDSS at Berkeley
The university has posted its curriculumonline, complete with assignments, slides and readings, and shared it with more than 89 other campuses. Classes have launched or are set to begin this fall at six California community colleges, four Cal State campuses and other universities including Howard, Tuskegee, Cornell, Barnard and the United States Naval Academy.
Last I checked Cornell was an Ivy and Barnard was a highly reputed LAC.
Shanghai Jiaotong University has been ranking the global universities since 2004, based on academic reputation and accomplishment. Their criteria have been the same since the beginning. You guess what? The top 12 universities on their list barely changed at all, always 10 US universities + Oxford and Cambridge. Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley,CIT, MIT, Princeton, Columbia and Chicago never missed a year, Yale missed a year; Half of the years, UCLA made the list, the other half, Cornell. The ranking is solely based on research, the result shows ranking can be extremely boring:)
Most non-EECS engineering majors at UCB take Engineering 7 (“Introduction to Computer Programming for Scientists and Engineers”) instead of CS 61A (although some allow the option of either).
CS 61A is required for L&S CS and EECS majors. It is an option for data science, cognitive science, and ORMS majors (i.e. one of three or four computing courses that can fulfill a computing requirement for these majors).
Must be why 368 students took Engineering 7 in spring 2023 and 417 are in it now in fall 2023, according to https://classes.berkeley.edu . That 785 students is slightly greater than the number of non-EECS engineering students per year who graduate from UCB, so there are probably some data science, cognitive science, and ORMS students choosing that class instead of CS 61A.
For international PhD students, research related criteria are the main criteria for choosing a university for PhD study, so it is not surprising that a global ranking that is most likely to be considered by PhD students considering going out-of-country is based on research related criteria.
