The 20 Smartest Colleges In America

College Search & Selection
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<p>The 20 Smartest Colleges In America</p>

<p>The</a> 20 Smartest Colleges In America - Yahoo! Finance</p>

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<p>Here’s the PDF of the full ranking:</p>

<p><a href=“http://blog.lumosity.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Lumositys-Smartest-Colleges.pdf[/url]”>http://blog.lumosity.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Lumositys-Smartest-Colleges.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Wow, Brown, Princeton and Columbia all do poorly, as do Michigan and JHU.</p>

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<p>wow ,intresting</p>

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<p>Thanks for the follow-up PDF file of the full ranking, beyphy! :)</p>

<p>Although I believe “Ohio Northern” at #49 should be replaced with #85 Ohio State for accuracy in terms of smartness. Nonetheless, I am content with the fact that tOSU is still ranked ahead of schools such as NYU, USC & Georgetown. I guess I should simply concede that Ohio Northern kids are great gamers. :p</p>

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<p>They ranked Rollins(90) higher than UF(99) and UC - Irvine(113). Nuff said imo.</p>

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<p>It’s a game. Who knows what students volunteered to play. And it surveys 400/3000+ colleges which means little.</p>

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<p>Wow, Boston College at 25th pummels Georgetown (121st), and even Notre Dame (35th)! How can that BE?! Surely GU can put up better numbers than that!</p>

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<p>Let us see now:</p>

<h1>13 Portland</h1>

<h1>27 U of Pacific</h1>

<h1>42 Butler</h1>

<h1>49 Ohio Northern</h1>

<h1>52 Cornell</h1>

<h1>59 Michigan</h1>

<h1>61 Columbia (whaaat???!!!)</h1>

<h1>65 Middlebury</h1>

<h1>115 USC</h1>

<h1>122 Georgetown</h1>

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<p>The survey does seem to employ a rigorous methodology. Its interesting that the University of Pacific does so well while Columbia does so poorly.</p>

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<p>^^^Just as I thought; Rose-Hulman is indeed “smarter” than Duke.</p>

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<p>This ranking is laughable. Northeastern smarter than Princeton? Pacific and BU smarter than Brown? Portland smater than Chicago? Columbia and Cornell out of the top 50? Georgetown and USC out of the top 100?</p>

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<p>I like this ranking. ;)</p>

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<p>I like it too (and have no trouble believing that some subset of students at Northeastern, Pacific, or BU have some stronger cognitive abilities than some subset of students at Princeton, Brown or Chicago.)</p>

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<p>That’s like comparing apples and oranges honestly…You can’t say they’re smartest…You can just say they’re best at those games…Just like IQ isn’t intelligence…It’s logic ability…</p>

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<p>I was thinking along similar lines this morning. Specifically, i wondered how semester (16 week) schools faired versus quarter (10 week) schools. My last quarter at UCLA, i had like 8 continuous weeks of papers to write (not including finals.) If i were in this situation (assuming i’d even heard about something like this) it would have been hard to take seriously. </p>

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<p>Michigan out of the top 50? (Come on, we all know you were thinking it ;))</p>

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<p>Rank University Median Grand
Index
1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 113.88
2 Harvard University 113.31
3 Stanford University 112.97
4 Northwestern University 112.61
5 Yale University 112.16
6 Washington University in St Louis 111.84
7 Dartmouth College 111.83
8 Wellesley College 111.60
9 Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology 111.20
10 Duke University 110.91</p>

<p>The top 10 seem credible.</p>

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<p>The “Lumosity” test measures attention, memory, speed, problem-solving, and flexibility. That covers a lot of cognitive ground. It surely isn’t a perfect measure of general intelligence, but I think the strong correlation with other measurements is significant. </p>

<p>Weaknesses:

  • they probably did not get an equally good random sample of students at all participating schools
  • they didn’t test across pre-college and post-college intervals, so they aren’t seeing any improvement of student performance over time that might be attributable to the colleges.</p>
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<p>it seems hard to take this ranking seriously…</p>

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<p>Just stop there. Lumosity is trying to promote their product with a very idiotic ranking of college students to further add to the rivalry between colleges and the promotion of college to the general population as something that makes a person smarter.</p>

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<p>Here’s some information about the people behind this study:</p>

<p>[Brain</a> Games & Brain Training - Lumosity](<a href=“http://www.lumosity.com/]Brain”>http://www.lumosity.com/)
[Company</a> Information, Company History, and Management Team - Lumosity](<a href=“http://www.lumosity.com/about/our-team]Company”>http://www.lumosity.com/about/our-team)
[Online</a> Brain Training - Academic Research Collaborators & Healthcare and Other Partners - Lumosity](<a href=“http://www.lumosity.com/about/partners#scientific-board]Online”>http://www.lumosity.com/about/partners#scientific-board)</p>

<p>They appear to be a bunch of neuroscience geeks trying to make some money off their knowledge (just like thousands of people in software and biotechnology start-ups.) They (or somebody familiar with their work) decided to try applying their techniques to the problem of ranking colleges. </p>

<p>Applying completely different concepts and methods from the ones used by US News, these folks come up with a ranking that is fairly similar. Posters are getting too hung up on a few individual differences (Columbia University too low, Pacific too high, etc.) Granted, the general similarity may be because both this ranking and the USNWR ranking reflect (directly or indirectly) colleges’ ability to attract a certain kind of student, without really measuring instructional quality or outcomes.</p>