<p>Consistently wrong or consistently misinformed does not make PA scores better because they are consistent. </p>
<p>Schools do change. I'm no fan of WUSTL and certainly would have never travelled 1,000 miles to go there, but if a school raises its SAT over 150 points after accounting for 1995 recentering in 15 years, it should be considered a better school.</p>
<p>Let me get this straight, academe in its entirety, all of the professors in America's top universities are "wrong and misinformed"? I guess those presidents, provosts, deans of admissions, researchers and professors are clueless as to the type of education their peer institutions are providing and the calibre of students they are graduating and sending off to graduate school.</p>
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I guess those presidents, provosts, deans of admissions, researchers and professors are clueless as to the type of education their peer institutions are providing and the calibre of students they are graduating and sending off to graduate school.
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Actually, Alexandre, this statement is pretty much true. Both my parents are professors, and I can tell you that they have no basis for knowing whether Michigan or Brown (or Berkeley or Dartmouth, etc) provides a better undergraduate education. Obviously they have some ideas of which schools will produce the highest quality students, when the differences are large (ie Harvard compared to Podunk state U), but really know no more about quality of undergraduate education than any of the people arguing on this thread. What they do know (and where their opinions would certainly deserve respect) is which institutions have the strongest faculty in their area of study, but they have no way of knowing anything about undergraduate education at the huge number of universities in the country.</p>
<p>Well, my uncle was a professor of Engineering at UIUC, Northwestern and now at Michigan. He knows which undergraduate programs produce the best graduate students and he is very much aware of what other peer universities are teaching their students through his constent communications with other professors in the field. My father was a professor of Economics at Columbia back in the 60s, and he has a similar take on the situation. Yes, professors aren't all-knowing, but they know more than the rest of us.</p>
<p>Alexandre:</p>
<p>I have been an undergrad and grad at three "elite" schools and a professor at four schools, two of them probably considered "elite." I couldn't even begin to tell you about the quality of the instruction or faculty at schools where I matriculated and taught outside my department. I would have no idea about the quality of, say, the biology program at some random school whether it is "elite" or not.</p>
<p>If your relatives know or knew all that, then I'm stunned. I don't understand how such a thing could be possible.</p>
<p>As for the PA rankings, they reflect, more than anything, a sort of overall view of the fame of a school's faculty. The larger and/or more published the faculty, the better the reputation among other colleges and universities. </p>
<p>I like the PA rankings. I think they apply a sort of common sense, qualitative dimension to the purely numeric data. I also recognize that they are qualitative rankings assigned by a self-selected sample of unknown origin who, if they are involved in academe, are almost certainly prejudiced towards large research schools. This isn't a bad thing, but it is a "thing" that influences the results.</p>
<p>Tarhunt, I did not say my relatives know the qualiuty of other departments at other universities. I said that based on the gruduate students they taught from other undergraduate institutions, they have a pretty good idea about which undergraduate programs are churning out the most qualified students for graduate school. I also said that they do know what departments in their field at other universities are teaching. It is limited, but when taken in their totality, all those involved in the PA give a pretty accurate picture.</p>
<p>There should be a list of masters/PHD program acceptances to see which undergrads are best</p>
<p>Alexandre and thethoughtprocess:</p>
<p>I also have grad students who are like all grad students in that they vary in intellect, training, and drive. In making decisions on whom to admit to the grad program, we definitely take the performance of past students from a program into account, as well as GPAs relative to those past students.</p>
<p>Could I tell you which undergrad programs in my field are "better" than others? In a very limited way. Really bright people are really bright people, and I have no idea (in most cases) what can be attributed to intellectual horsepower and what can be attributed to training. Oh, some students are better quantitatively prepared than others. That's one measure. But other students have had more training in other aspects, and so it becomes difficult to assign an overall rating.</p>
<p>But think of this. I actually work with these students, and my knowledge is both suspect and limited to a single field. If administrators are filling out these surveys, they are not actually teaching grad students (or undergrads) in ANY field. How could their knowledge be better than my very, very limited knowledge?</p>
<p>thethoughtprocess:</p>
<p>Nice idea, but there are too many factors involved. Some schools just naturally send more students to grad schools than others. Some schools admit only diamonds, so they tend to turn out diamonds. This single factor analysis would not tell us much, I'm afraid.</p>
<p>“Let me get this straight, academe in its entirety, all of the professors in America's top universities are "wrong and misinformed"?”</p>
<p>Well, only 58 per cent of those who received a survey responded. If you think about it, it is very possible that none of the top universities actually responded……. I’m just saying…..</p>
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but they have no way of knowing anything about undergraduate education at the huge number of universities in the country.
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</p>
<p>Actually the faculty at the graduate and professional schools evaluate applications from undergraduates every year and decide who to admit, and who to recruit, based on these applications. They look at the courses they took, the rigor and content of them, scores on the entrance exams, and past performance of graduates from that college in their program. So any faculty member involved in grad or prof admissions will have a detailed opinion of the quality of people they see coming from schools whose students consisently submit applications.</p>
<p>These same faculty look very closely at what goes on at their competitor colleges. True, the MIT faculty may not know that much about what happens at any artibrary member of the 3,000 college across the country, but they pay attention to Caltech and Stanford, since they are constantly competing for students and faculty. Harvard and Yale keep constant watch of one another, and are perpetually luring away students and faculty. Within peer groups within fields, the world is not that large.</p>
<p>So methodology like the NRC, that ask professors for opinions within their fields, is pretty reliable. The problem lies in trying to expand this to a global assessment of a university. Unless the uni itself has a relatively narrow focus-like Caltech- no one person will know much about the quality well outside her/his field.</p>
<p>Could it be? I’m a “Senior Member”?</p>
<p>-I’ve only been coming to this confounded website for years…. :rolleyes: </p>
<p>Nothing of substance here.. feel free to move on. :)</p>
<p>afan:</p>
<p>Yes, but ... it is not faculty that is returning these surveys to US News. To the best of my knowledge, it is a single administrator who may or may not be the administrative assistant to the administrative assistant to the assistant to the President.</p>
<p>I like the PA. I think it is a good, qualitative brake on some quantitative numbers of suspect value. But I don't think the people doing the voting know much beyond the faculty's reputation for research. </p>
<p>(And, BTW, who on earth rates Harvard, Yale, and Princeton as not "distinguished"? No school got a 5. Odd.)</p>
<p>"And, BTW, who on earth rates Harvard, Yale, and Princeton as not "distinguished"?"</p>
<p>I'm guessing it was Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. :)</p>
<p>Lol, i am content, College Park is on that list. :), sad because UT Austin is a great school as well. Brand_182 would you like to comment? (this is abe)</p>
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it is not faculty that is returning these surveys to US News
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</p>
<p>Right, but it is faculty who return the surveys for the NRC.</p>
<p>I gather there is no answer to whether the publics report their SAT's differently than do the privates, or whether one should really increase the mean at the publics to compensate.</p>
<p>Harvard and Yale may know a lot about each other, but how much do either of them know about the relative merits of WUSTL vs Vanderbilt vs Emory vs Northwestern? Administrators at schools like Brown and Cornell may not know any more about these schools, except that to give them a low score to make it less likely that they rise above Brown and Cornell in the rankings.</p>
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Administrators at schools like Brown and Cornell may not know any more about these schools, except that to give them a low score to make it less likely that they rise above Brown and Cornell in the rankings.
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</p>
<p>preposterous</p>
<p>Do publics report SAT scores differently from privates? Seems unlikely. It's all from the common data set.</p>
<p>Publics usually report the best scores in one sitting... while privates report the best scores from multiple sittings.</p>
<p>kazz, what evidence do you have for that?</p>