<p>Maybe they should not get to rate their own school for starters. Why does this sort of stuff happen more in the South?</p>
<p>USNews survey form</p>
<p>So Barrons, besides the Univ of Fla rating, what would you change?</p>
<p>This makes me upset as a UF alumnus.
</p>
<p>I’m going to go with the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So far, “happening more in the South” is being inferred from two universities.</p>
<p>I don’t see where the evidence is that it happens more in the south. Has someone gathered the peer assessment forms for all of the university presidents in the US and examined them to see if they ranked their own school higher than it perhaps deserves? I would venture to guess that many do, out of loyalty if nothing else. (How many candidates for office do you think vote for their opponent?)</p>
<p>Is there a problem with his rankings of the other Us in Florida?</p>
<p>Personally, my problem is with the supposedly confidential data from a survey being broadcast to the public.</p>
<p>Outside FLA he seems pretty much in tune with the averages.</p>
<p>2 out of 2 ain’t bad. With the southern schools being generally less respected I think it just is a way of trying a little too hard to get attention.</p>
<p>wow, he rates Brown, Dartmouth, Georgetown, Carnegie Mellon, Notre Dame & Emory 2 rungs down (as 3’s) relative to his own institution.</p>
<p>UF president Machen is confusing kudzu with ivy!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Did you look at that page? There’s a lot I would change.</p>
<p>LOL. This guy ranked his own school ahead of Caltech, Chicago, Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Emory, Northwestern, Penn, Rice, Vanderbilt, UCLA, UIUC, UNC Chapel Hill, UVA, Wisconsin, and WUSTL, among others. It’s nice to believe in the strengths of your own institution, but this is ridiculous. Obviously they ought to throw out the score for the scorer’s own institution. On the other hand, if everyone gives their own institution a high score, it won’t matter as that score will just be an outlier that doesn’t affect the cumulative outcome.</p>
<p>A more troubling pattern is the obvious low-balling of in-state and regional competitors; possibly even national competitors (like most of the non-HYP Ivies). Machen scored only 10 institutions “marginal.” Of those, 6 were in Florida, and a 7th was a historically black private university in neighboring Georgia which might compete with UF for some students. </p>
<p>Machen scored only 9 institutions “distinguished” (5): Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT (all in the “Duh!” category), Columbia (interesting in light of the relatively low ratings he gave the other Ivies), and two top publics, UC-Berkeley and Michigan, with which UF probably has relatively few cross-admits. And of course his own UF.</p>
<p>On the other hand, as biased as these ratings appear to be, it’s hard to see how they affect any school’s PA ratings all that much. If these patterns—giving high ratings to one’s own school while low-balling one’s closest competitors—were widespread, they should largely cancel each other out, except perhaps accentuating the distance between HYPSM (which no one’s going to low-ball) and everyone else.</p>
<p>I must have missed the list of other Ivy League schools. Is there a list?</p>
<p>I’m assuming that everybody ranks their own school as high or higher than the school should be ranked.</p>
<p>bclintonk-- Clemson also had reports of these irregularities. I think it’s a major problem because with a lot of smaller, more regionally based schools, non-competitors asked to rank them are going to be way more likely to either underrate or say they have no opinion about those places.</p>
<p>There’s more to it than that, but I think this clearly casts into doubt the PA the same way most of us said it should be cast into doubt. PA shouldn’t be done the way it is right now, period.</p>
<p>dstark-- <a href=“http://www.gainesville.com/assets/pdf/GS17003616.PDF[/url]”>http://www.gainesville.com/assets/pdf/GS17003616.PDF</a>
From the OP…</p>
<p>That has all the scores he gave.</p>
<p>OK. I see it.</p>
<p>Hmmm. Wonder what the guy has against Brown and Dartmouth?</p>
<p>Maybe everything should be made public.</p>
<p>Dstark, click on the second link for the entire survey. (Check out the changed Xs, too.)</p>
<p>Yes. That’s what I did. Thanks.</p>
<p>I think that it’s really interesting (although I don’t know how or why it was made public). Other than his own school (which is sort of understandable and I’m going to give him a pass), bclintonk is right that the troubling aspect is his lowballing of competitors, particularly in Florida. However, as to everything else, I don’t think he’s too far off. Here is his list of outstanding schools:</p>
<p>Stanford
UC-Berkeley
Yale
Harvard
MIT
University of Michigan
Princeton
Columbia</p>
<p>not too far off most people’s lists of the top schools</p>
<p>Here is his list of strong schools</p>
<p>NYC
Cornell
California Institute of Technology
UCLA
USC
Emory
Northwestern
University of Chicago
UIUC
Purdue
University of Iowa
Tulane
Johns Hopkins
Washington University-St. Louis
SUNY-Stony Brook
Duke
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
University of Pennsylvania
Vanderbilt
Rice
University of Texas-Austin
University of Utah
University of Virginia
University of Wisconsin</p>
<p>The main areas he seems to differ the most from the norm is that he ranks Brown, Georgetown, Dartmouth and Notre Dame as only good and some of his strong schools are a little suspect.</p>
<p>It seems just a little ridiculous that some of those strong schools are considered peers with the other strong schools and that some of his good schools are where they are. It’s far from just Brown-- just look at the company amongst good schools and strong schools and you’ll find many schools that don’t seem like they belong in that peer group and should either be up or down.</p>
<p>Utah and Tulane are peers with CalTech while Brown and Dartmouth are peers with Auburn, Arizona State, Colorado State, UConn, etc…</p>
<p>And actually, to be fair about the Florida schools, I don’t think that he lowballed them so much as that he gave his own school way too high a ranking. For example, one could definitely argue that among the other Florida schools, only U Miami is a “good” school (don’t know that much about Florida State).</p>
<p>midatlmom-- if that were the case, I think a lot more schools could be ranked 2s and 1s than are on his list.</p>
<p>It’s just very clear that people either game these, don’t take it seriously, don’t know, or all three. The peer groups created by this survey are way out of whack.</p>
<p>modestmelody</p>
<p>I agree with you that some of his schools don’t make sense. However, as to Brown, there is definitely a group in academia (and I do not agree with them), that feels that the Brown academic experience is not structured or rigorous enough. He might be one of them (but of course that doesn’t explain Dartmouth, Tulane etc.)</p>
<p>Oh I don’t think it’s a Brown thing at all…</p>
<p>I just think that if someone cares to, and writes up the list of schools in total like you did, there are some pretty odd peer groups created. It’s more than two or three schools… it’s a whole group of schools in whole groups that are off. If we’re to say that he’s fairly differentiating between top schools and those Florida schools, there would be a lot of differences I think.</p>