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<p>Here’s a perfect example of an imput that is already transparent, easy to access and is a widely used endpoint:</p>
<p>[Which</a> College Scores Best on the GMAT? - BusinessWeek](<a href=“Bloomberg - Are you a robot?”>Bloomberg - Are you a robot?)</p>
<p>There are plenty of others like it.</p>
<p>Ah, teaching to the test at its best! ^^</p>
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<p>John, when all the dust settles in the Vos affaird, you might have to admit that the incentive to cheat was trivial. I know you resent my repeated argument that the impact of increasing the score from 1480 to 1510 had little to no impact on the final rankings. As Adams wrote, why did Vos risk his career and reputation for so little should be ascertained. </p>
<p>Fwiw, the risk of being delisted is not a disincentive as much as an unworkable penalty. Considering how many schools would prefer to be forgotten by Morse and his goons, more than a few might be cheating on purpose! </p>
<p>For seeking to plug holes rather than start from scratch, I merely use the past decade of observations to conclude that nobody has come close to unveil a better mousetrap. However, that should not stop us from limiting the real root of the problem, and that root is nowhere else than in the offices of the reporting schools.</p>
<p>“Of course, you could nominate rjkofnovi for the trip to Durham.”</p>
<p>It’s tempting…</p>
<p>I took a look at those GMAT score rankings. What you have is a non-scientific self-reported survey where the averge respondents per school was a small percentage of the total. “The average number of respondents for each school was 39.”</p>
<p>How many at each actually take the GMAT in any year?? At larger schools it could easily be 100’s.
Just another example of bad statistics that are assumed to be reliable because a magazine prints them. These make the US News data look like gospel.</p>
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<p>I wish I could use the excuse of having typed that line on an iPad, but that was not the case. The price one pays to type and post without reading it for accuracy is the occasional lapsus linguae. Obviously, Northwestern does publish its CDS. I must have been thinking about the joy of the cross-audits when I used this example. I think I was hesitating between Washington at St Louis and Notre Dame and ended up typing Northwestern. </p>
<p>Mea culpa!</p>
<p>Barrons wrote:
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<p>Between the GMAT, MCAT, GRE, nursing, dentistry, veterinary and forestry graduate school exams you could easily cover a quarter of a typical graduating class, more if you can recover the exam results of recent alumni.</p>
<p>As for teaching to the exam, that’s a bit of a red herring; no one is forced to go to graduate school, and, I’m not sure what possible incentive could possibly induce someone to sit for an exam they don’t intend to use. The biggest objection would be that you would be comparing fairly elite groups of students. But, so what? Compare one college’s elite students to another college’s elite and compare them to their SATs. Is that a bad thing?</p>
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<p>Northeastern is a mandatory co-op school, with the typical program including three co-ops interspersed among eight semesters of school, typically taking five years to graduate. A four year option with two co-ops is offered, but it would not reduce the amount of tuition paid, although it would save a year of room and board costs.</p>
<p>xiggi wrote:
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<p>Let’s get real. When all the dust settles on what you insist on calling “the Vos affair”, you’ll be lucky if Claremont McKenna doesn’t go to its waiting list for at least a third of next year’s entering class and President Gann doesn’t wind up “quietly resigning”.</p>
<p>Call it whatever you want. There must some hyperbole that pleases you. As far as your vitriolic wishful thinking, I will gladly bet that the waiting list will remain very much in line with the previous years. I assume you can click on the CDS forms to ascertain the historical reliance on the waiting list. </p>
<p>All we can do at this time is speculating about the depth of the problems at CMC. You must have a clearer crystal ball than I do.</p>
<p>Why do we need rankings at all?</p>
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<p>Good point. We really don’t need rankings, but consumers do need data about the colleges, particularly if they want our $250k. Prior to USNews weighing in with a CDS. standardized data was impossible to come by.</p>
<p>(The rankings portion just sells the magazines and enable bragging rights.)</p>
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<p>A total waste of print space. Of course, Harvard has the top GMAT scorers. It also has the top mcat scorers and LSAT scorers, and GRE scorers. The reason is simple: Harvard recruits the top high school test-takers, the best 18-year-old test takers in the world (ignoring Caltech). Do you really think that they won’t do as well after four years in Cambridge? But note, we ONLY know that H has the top test takers because of USNews. It was only in the last couple of years that H began posting its CDS.</p>
<p>Thank you for making my point. :D</p>
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<p>Yeah, I know all that. But nowhere does NEU tell customers that less than xx% graduate in four years. Their website makes it look like a 4-year graduation is doable. If it is not, they should not obfuscate. But they do. Even with mandated reporting by the feds.</p>
<p>^ UCBAlumnus stated the typical program is three coops but I can find no documentation to that effect. Students can have from 1-3 coops. In the case of 1 or 2 coops it’s usually done within a 4 year program. And it is NOT required:
[Experiential</a> Education > How Co-op Works > Co-op at a Glance](<a href=“http://www.northeastern.edu/experiential-learning/coop/howcoopworks/coopataglance.html]Experiential”>http://www.northeastern.edu/experiential-learning/coop/howcoopworks/coopataglance.html)</p>
<p>Bluebayou wrote:
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<p>We’re not trying to measure the success of Harvard’s recruiting efforts. If USNews wants to continue certifying that, they are welcome to do so.</p>
<p>What we’re really trying to measure is the value added by three years spent on Harvard’s campus and you can’t do that without comparing Harvard to a wide array of other campuses. Perhaps, Harvard’s test-takers have reached their maximum test taking potential. Perhaps, there are certain schools where late-bloomers have a better chance of catching up, or at least making great strides. Right now, we have no idea which schools are actually producing better test takers (if that’s how you want to put it).</p>
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<p>And, what did USNews do with all of this new data? Nothing. They pouted and bullied the colleges into becoming partners with them (and paying for the privilege) and then went ahead and continued publishing essentially the same product they have been for the past twenty years.</p>
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<p>While I am not sure if such analysis has much value, a good start to measuring the “added” value of the college years would be to measure the increase/decrease of the GMAT/GRE scores over the SAT scores of the same students. </p>
<p>There is probably a very good reason why this has not been done or published before!</p>
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<p>Wait. [rubs eyes] Could we possibly be in agreement? Halleleujah!</p>
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<p>Probably because the colleges from where the applicants are applying arent’t the final recipients of the GRE results. They’d have to be collected either from Princeton or from the graduate schools themselves.</p>
<p>[Four</a> Years or Five? You Choose.](<a href=“http://www.northeastern.edu/neuhome/experiential-learning/co-op-faq.html]Four”>http://www.northeastern.edu/neuhome/experiential-learning/co-op-faq.html) does indicate that a student can choose four years with two co-ops or five years with three co-ops.</p>
<p>NEU’s common data set says that its four year graduation rate is “N/A, NU is a five-year school”, while listing numbers that indicate 68% graduate in five years or less, and 75% graduate in six years or less.</p>
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<p>I agree that the data is useful, and there’s no downside to that. The problematic thing about the rankings is that one little number to the far left – the ranking itself. It serves no good purpose, and tempts colleges to cheat as we have seen many times.</p>
<p>The problem would be solved if they made just one change – list the colleges alphabetically. All the same information, no ranking. But…</p>
<p><a href=“The%20rankings%20portion%20just%20sells%20the%20magazines%20and%20enable%20bragging%20rights.”>quote</a></p>
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<p>These, of course, are the true reasons for rankings. It’s big business now so it won’t go away, unless we get a critical mass of courageous colleges who refuse to play.</p>
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GMAT was a totally different animal to the SAT when I took them. I hated the computer adaptive testing environment of the GMAT (can’t skip questions, math problems on a screen, countdown clock in your face) vs. the SAT format. In other words, there is no baseline in the same testing format. These tests don’t measure intelligence. They only measure how well you know how to game/utilize the test format tricks.</p>
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<p>Not me. 
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<p>I guess I don’t see much value in spending a quarter of a million dollars to become a better test taker. (That’s easily accomplished at home. For free.) But perhaps you see the value prop differently.</p>
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<p>I disagree. USNews loads all of that data online (for <$20) for all the world to see. It’s a great one-stop resource, IMO.</p>
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<p>Personally, I have no problem with big business bcos they usually pay big taxes. Win-win. Again, the academic community could do the same, but they don’t. (And realistically/politically, they can’t do the same. So all they can do is whine about the results.)</p>