<p>The problem is that people DO appear to ascribe much quality to these ratings. It can hurt or help very fine schools.</p>
<p>^^ I agree. Unfortunately most people do no utilize the rankings as they should. A student that could be better served at a specific university ranked #45 may ended up going to another ranked #25 just because of the number.</p>
<p>As far as Machen’s dishonesty while completing the US News survey, this may be rampant across the nation. Interestingly, the University of Florida keeps having ethical issues pop up. Their medical school just got an F as far some pharmaceutical disclosures are concerned. But heck, if the President does his thing, what can anyone expect from the rest?</p>
<p>[University</a> of Florida med school fails ethics measure; Miami gets a B](<a href=“http://www.palmbeachpost.com/health/content/state/epaper/2009/06/17/0617medschoolethics.html]University”>http://www.palmbeachpost.com/health/content/state/epaper/2009/06/17/0617medschoolethics.html)</p>
<p>Well since we are talking about Presidents, let’s take a look at Donna Shalala.</p>
<p>[University</a> of Miami 2006 custodial workers’ strike - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Miami_2006_custodial_workers’_strike]University”>University of Miami Justice for Janitors campaign - Wikipedia)</p>
<ul>
<li>Got lots more if you want to go this route</li>
</ul>
<p>SSbick, please grow up. This thread is about **UF President cooks up the US News rankings ** It is not about UM vs UF.</p>
<p>PA scores are reported to two significant figures. I’m still waiting for someone to show me the math that any one respondent can “cook” the reported numerical score.</p>
<p>rogracer, it would be naive to think that only “one respondent” cooks the reported numerical scores. The problem is that the dishonesty exhibited by the ‘respectable’ UF President could be rampant.</p>
<p>It is bad for Machen’s that he got caught with his pants down. I think is good for everyone else to realize that the PA score is self serving, biased and in fact meritless in its current form. I betcha Mr Morse will be making some changes to do the methodology. That on its own, would be enough prove that the scandal has been loud enough.</p>
<p>Imagine all the other Presidents now being upset at UF and giving it next year a 2 , across the board. You do not fail to see that math on that, do you ?</p>
<p>"Imagine all the other Presidents now being upset at UF and giving it next year a 2 , across the board. You do not fail to see that math on that, do you ? "</p>
<p>I am sure you will hope and pray for that to happen everyday for the next year. The point is Machen was pretty much spot on when it came to his ranking. Most of the people on this thread agree with this point, and just take issue with the overall PA assessment in general. If anything Clemson is more likely to take a hit than UF (but I seriously doubt that will happen). Atleast malicious intent was not Machen’s objective.</p>
<p>SSbick
</p>
<p>Perhaps if you keep repeating it ad nauseum more people will believe you. It must be extremely frustrating to you that newspaper editorials all over Florida do not seem to share your wisdom. You can add two other little papers like… …The New York Times and blogs on USA Today to the mix. </p>
<p>Machen’s survey has become the poster child example of why the PA in general has no merit. We are all grateful to him.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This is simply not true. Many posters on this thread, including myself, feel that while Machen ranked his own school too highly, had a few offbase results and may have included rankings for schools he didn’t know enough about, in general, it was not a bad attempt at a ranking (after all look at how we all disagree on CC–there is no ranking that will satisfy everyone and different people have different views of what makes a good college).</p>
<p>This is to be contrasted with President Barker of Clemson’s USNWR survey, which was an embarrassing survey with no attempt to make any principled distinctions, except to say that Clemson was the only strong school in the country. </p>
<p>Take a look at both surveys, myopinion, and tell me which one is embarrassing.</p>
<p>Pres. Barker of Clemson 2009 USNews Survey: <a href=“http://media.independentmail.com/and...urvey_2009.pdf[/url]”>http://media.independentmail.com/and...urvey_2009.pdf</a></p>
<p>Pres. Machen of UF <a href=“http://www.gainesville.com/assets/pdf/GS17003616.PDF[/url]”>http://www.gainesville.com/assets/pdf/GS17003616.PDF</a></p>
<p>Edited to add–I can’t get the links to work, but if you go to this thread, you can still access them I believe <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/732874-usnews-report-pa-scores-original-documents.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/732874-usnews-report-pa-scores-original-documents.html</a></p>
<p>The Clemson survey appears unavailable…do you have another link?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>And (at this point) I’m just waiting for one PA survey to not be an embarrassment. Just one.</p>
<p>“Machen’s survey has become the poster child example of why the PA in general has no merit. We are all grateful to him.”</p>
<p>MyOpinion, would you care yo explain that statement? I personally don’t see how his ratings discredit the Peer Assessment score. Of his dozens of ratings, only 4 (Brown, Dartmouth, Florida and Utah) seem out of place, and one of those 4 is perfectly natural given that he is the president of that institution. The remaining dozens of universities he rated were all assigned scores 1 point or less from their actual average PA. </p>
<p>I am not saying that one should believe the PA, but how has Machen’s ratings proven to “all” that the PA has not merit? If anything, it would appear that Machen’s point of view is shared with the a good portion of academe and will probably strengthen the faith that many of us (myself included) have in the PA. With the exception of Florida, all universities he assigned a score of 5.0 to have actual PAs of 4.4 or better. He assigned Miami a rating of 3.0 and its actual PA is 3.2. He assigned FSU a PA of 3.0 and its actual PA is 3.0.</p>
<p>I would love to see how other presidents have responded to the PA. I am willing to bet the vast majority of presidents assign scores of 5.0 to their own institution. I am also fairly certain that they know that the hundreds of other presidents who assign a score to their institution will vitually nullify that rating.</p>
<p>Alexandre
</p>
<p>Because as I said before, Machen’s got caught with his pants down. The fact that any University President or Dean could be doing the same, indicates that the PA survey has no merit. The survey is relying on the objectivity of those who are completing it, which in fact is dubious enough as it is. An “objection opinion” is nothing more than a great oxymoron. Indeed Machen’s has become the poster child of what some of us have been talking for years (not you, of course)</p>
<p>It is very improbable that Machen has sufficient knowledge to be able to assign PA scores to all the schools that he did. I do not think that he answered “No knowledge” to any one of them. That, on its own is pretty outrageous. And contrary to your opinion, the editorials coming from Florida are critical of his handling of the rankings, not just the four schools that you mention. But in any case, his rankings of Brown and Dartmouth have some people hysterically laughing. </p>
<p>We would all love to see how other presidents have responded to the PA. That won’t ever happen. But let’s talk again about this next year and see what US News did to the methodology as a result of this latest scandal. It will make for a great topic, i am sure.</p>
<p>I am sure we can agree on one thing; the USNWR is very flawed. Hopefully a more reliable rating (not ranking) of universities will emerge in the future. One never knows.</p>
<p>I don’t see how USNWR is very flawed Alexandre.</p>
<p>What would be your ideal ranking? A 100% PA rating perhaps?</p>
<p>Not quite ring<em>of</em>fire. I think 25% weight is sufficient for the PA. But I think each of the criteria in the USNWR (including the PA), can be improved upon. For example, in the case of the PA, respondants should be limited to rating 50-75 peer institutions, not more. That will force them to rate universities they are truly familiar with. Overall, outliers (10% from each side of the extreme) should be left out of the average for each institution. </p>
<p>I think Selectivity, Financial Resources and Faculty Resources are all very important too and can all be properly audited, but they aren’t at the moment. Some universities do not include statistics from a fraction of their applicant pools because they do not fall within the college of Arts and Sciences of Engineering. Other schools submit SAT averages using a super-scored base whereas others do not. Some universities submit official reports that are open to scrutiny whereas others are shrouded in secrecy. Finally, in the case of standardized tests, any evaluation wouldbe incomplete without lisitng the number of times students took the test and the percentage of students who took prep courses such as Kaplan or Princeton Review. </p>
<p>Financial resources should take status as public or private into account. </p>
<p>Graduation rates are fine, but why differentiate between universities within insignificant range of each other? Some universities are harsher than others and have different demographic and academic requirements. A school that graduates 83% of its students should not be considered inferior to a school that graduates 93% of its students. Schools with graduation rates between 90% and 100% should be assigned identical. Schools with graduate rates between 80% and 90% should also be assigned identical scores. Schools with graduation rates between 70% and 80% should also be assigned identical scores etc…</p>
<p>Alumni donation rates should be left out entirely. If the USNWR insists on having a student satisfaction result, it would be best to leave it unweighed.</p>
<p>^ I was surprised that Machen didn’t rate any university “don’t know.” On the other hand, there are only 263 of them in the survey he completed. That’s actually not such an outrageous number to know something about, especially for someone who’s been in the business as long as he has, who started out as a student in the Mid-South (Vanderbilt undergrad) and as a grad student in the Midwest (St. Louis U, Iowa), started his career as a professor and administrator in the Southeast (UNC Chapel Hill), then returned to the Midwest to become a top level administrator (Provost at Michigan) before becoming president of the Universities of Utah in the Mountain West and Florida in the Southeast—so 7 schools in 7 states, 5 athletic conferences, and depending how you count 3-5 distinct regions of the country, each with its own distinct cohort of prime competitors, which should rapidly pull you up to some kind of familiarity with dozens if not hundreds of schools. That experience should give Machen a pretty wide-angle vision, and fairly direct knowledge of a sizable number of schools. There are a lot of regular armchair observers on CC who claim to know about far more colleges and universities than that, with far less experience to back it up.</p>
<p>On the other hand, there have to be some colleges out of the 263 that Machen didn’t really know much about. But if you look at his scoresheet, his strategy with respect to these schools seems pretty obvious, even defensible: for the schools he knew least well, it appears he assigned them a default score of 2 (“adequate”). </p>
<p>The rationale, I presume, would be something like this: "Look, I’ve been in this business a long time, I know a lot about what’s going on, who’s up and who’s down, which faculty are coming and going from which institutions, and so on. If some research university out there hasn’t caught my eye by now, it’s probably not doing stellar things—so I’m certainly not going to give it a 5 (“distinguished”) or a 4 (“strong”) or even a 3 ("good’) unless I’ve got strong information on which to base that judgment. But I’m not going to give it a 1 (“marginal”) either, unless I have reason to know it’s just pretty weak. So 2 is the default position; I’ll assume it’s “adequate” unless it’s demonstrated to my satisfaction that it deserves a 3+ (“good” or better) or a 1 (“marginal”). Notice that Machen rated the largest number of institutions “2,” and in every single case, the average PA score of those institutions turned out to be within a point of Machen’s mark—suggesting that most PA scorers agreed with Machen most of the time. He reserved the clearly negative “1” (“marginal”) rating for only a tiny handful of institutions with which he’s likely to have had some familiarity. </p>
<p>Again, this doesn’t prove he’s right. But it does suggest there’s not nearly as much randomness in these scores as the PA critics would have you believe. By and large, it appears the PA score represents a genuine consensus view, widely (though not necessarily unanimously) shared among academic administrators.</p>
<p>In my opinion what rings true is this statement made by the Eckherd college President Eastman:</p>
<p>Eastman said university presidents make assessments for the rankings that are based on a university’s reputation, rather than its actual academic quality.</p>
<p>“My argument is that most presidents are lucky to know about the academic quality of their own institutions,” he said.</p>
<p>Machen rated FSU a “3” which was significantly better than what the Clemson president rated the school. I’d argue that a “4” is much more accurate for Florida State University. I still see no value in providing a PA rating for your own school.</p>
<p>I have been a proponent of PA because, as far as I can tell, it’s the only part of the USNWR rankings that attempts to measure the outcome of the education at a given institution. Having really bright, competitive students (SAT scores and selectivity) does raise the bar in the classroom, but if all those students are not getting educations that best use and improve their skills, or if grade inflation is so rampant that the college’s standards at admission basically disappear over the course of four years, then that should factor into the rankings. </p>
<p>Although PA attempts to measure the outcome based on the reputation of its education and its alumni across higher education, obviously it has been a game at some institutions, much the way others have used the waitlist. To me, that speaks volumes about the integrity (or lack of it) of the leadership at those universities. Like others, I’d really like to see the PA scores of multiple universities. I would expect the presidents of Harvard and Princeton to give themselves 5s, but not to give each other 2s. </p>
<p>I also would like to know if USNWR has become so important that it is corrupting (at least, in a small way) higher education leadership, or if these newest scandals are merely exposing what has been there all along.</p>