Can anyone explain in simple words the differences of S and R rankings? I didn’t quite understand that from the description of the two methods.
http://chronicle.com/article/NRC-Rankings-Overview-/124743/
If you are looking at grad schools you should post to that forum. Those rankings have to do with the doctoral programs at each university, there is no reason to split hairs over this for purposes of selecting an undergrad program. Basically S means survey, the results are from a survey and R means regression, the results are from regression analysis of data.
S-Rank: Programs are ranked highly if they are strong in the criteria that scholars say are most important.
R-Rank: Programs are ranked highly if they have similar features to programs viewed by faculty as top-notch.
… but not the same kind of survey as the USNWR Peer Assessment survey.
NRC asks scholars in each ranked field to identify which criteria, of all the criteria the NRC measures, are most important for that field. The NRC produces an S-ranking based on weighted criteria. The weights are derived from the survey results.
The NRC rankings may have some value for undergraduate students who are fairly sure about their choice of major. They could help identify which colleges employ highly productive researchers (and possibly good teachers) in that field. However, there is no guarantee that those professors will even teach undergraduates, or that the criteria used to rank the graduate department are the most important for undergrads.
How do you know if the benefits of graduate department goodness trickle down to undergrads? I would think this is more likely to happen at rich, well-endowed universities with relatively small undergraduate class sizes. Then again, large lecture classes are one way to expose relatively many students to the best professors. There may be halo effects (or “honey pot” effects) just from having superstar faculty on the payroll.
In some fields (even at giant RUs), upperclassmen are often taking intense small grad-level courses in their major.
And while some majors would still have big upper-level courses (econ, bio, and psych seem popular everywhere), that’s not so true for other majors, often (anthropology, philosophy, etc.)
The NRC has a detailed explanation of the S and R rankings, and their methodology, [url=<a href=“http://chronicle.com/article/New-Doctoral-Program/124634/%20%3Cview-source:http://chronicle.com/article/New-Doctoral-Program/124634%3E%3C/a%3E%5Dhere%5B/url”>http://chronicle.com/article/New-Doctoral-Program/124634/%20%3Cview-source:http://chronicle.com/article/New-Doctoral-Program/124634%3E%3C/a%3E]here[/url].
I’m going to assume that you aren’t necessarily interested in the nitty-gritty details of the statistical analyses used (both rankings use surveys and both use regression). The basic difference conceptually is exactly what it says, and what @BrownParent wrote in the latter half of their comment. In the S-rankings, the faculty directly ranking which characteristics of a PhD program they think are most important - so they may say that faculty citations are more important than diversity, and that diversity is more important than time to degree, so on and so forth. The faculty rankings of those characteristics are then used to calculate weights, and the weights are used in the regression analysis when ranking the programs. So if faculty say that time to degree is very important in the quality of a doctoral program, programs with low time-to-degree will have higher rankings than those that don’t, all the things being equal.
The R-rankings use a very similar procedure, with one difference. This time the faculty are only indirectly ranking which characteristics of PhD programs they think are most important. They do this by rating actual PhD programs in their field. Then the NRC researchers look at the characteristics of the programs that the faculty rate very highly, and they use those characteristics to create the weights. So for example, if the faculty for psychology programs all say that Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, and Michigan all have excellent programs, and one of the things that those 4 programs all have in common is a low time-to-degree, then the NRC concludes that time-to-degree is really important to faculty when ranking programs and thus weights that heavily in their regression analysis.
Their stated reason for doing this is to look at the differences between what faculty say are important characteristics and what they seemed to value when they rated actual programs.. The S-rankings are based on what faculty say are important characteristics in programs; the R-rankings are based on actual holistic ratings of programs given by faculty.
These rankings are useful but outdated. If you look at the publication date it is 2010 and the data were gathered in 2007! Nevertheless, they can be useful since a lot of the criteria have not changed. It might be more useful to go to the [url="<a href=“http://phds.org%22%5Dphds.org%5B/url”>http://phds.org"]phds.org[/url] site which has a search engine which use the NRC data to let you search programs according to your own criteria.
As always, make sure that you take these “rankings” with a grain of salt. You need to find a program that fits your goals and sometimes small and not as famous programs have very good faculty who would be excellent thesis advisors.
OP is an international high school student, that’s why I kept my answer short and sweet.
@BrownParent - Thanks for letting me know. I did not look into their previous posts. Hopefully it will be useful to someone else…
@xraymancs, @BrownParent, @juillet, @tk21769, @PurpleTitan, thanks for your answers. Tbh, right now I am just digging up various rankings of schools while waiting for replies from the RD schools. This ranking seems a bit unclear so thanks again for explaining.
Yes, as @BrownParent already said…if by RD you mean regular decision undergrad schools, these rankings are functionally meaningless for you. They’re for doctoral programs, but the rankings for doctoral programs don’t necessarily map directly onto the quality of an undergrad education in a specific major.