<p>basically for those who are two lazy to read: Clemson released it's peer assessment surveys to the public and in fact Clemson rated itself as the highest school, higher than schools like Yale, UC-Berkeley etc...</p>
<p>The question for the peer assessment is, is Clemson's excuse that in their opinion they are the best school in the country (if a university president didn't think that, he'd probably be fired haha), or is this just a lame excuse that nobody's buying it?</p>
<p>Personally, I'm not buying this excuse. Clemson is good and it should give itself high ratings too but you have to admit that there at least several schools that are doing a better job than you.</p>
<p>Here's what President Barker had to say in defense of his actions:</p>
<p>"The request from U.S. News is to measure the academic quality of undergraduate programs. It did not say research programs, it did not say prestige. It did not say size of endowments, or anything other than undergraduate education. And I took that charge seriously, measuring what I would think would be the full package of the undergraduate experience," including faculty-student ratio, relationships between faculty and students in and out of class ... do they spend time having lunch together. I believe that Clemson does that better than anyone. That's why my ranking for Clemson is where it is. You'll notice I did not give anyone a 5, because I did not believe any of us had reached that level.... I'm a hard grader............ Other schools would bring a great deal to the table, and I was adding that component of fiscal discipline on top of the quality of what's going on. There are hundreds of forms that are submitted each year, and one form doesn't move a school one way or the other, to use one form to game the system is impossible. I think a university president needs to believe in what the school is doing. Clemson is my alma mater, but also my school. I would not deny that I have some bias, but what I'm doing there is my reflection on what's happening in undergraduate education."</p>
<p>There is no such thing as a “best” school. There are only the best schools (plural) for your student.</p>
<p>If I had the money, I’d go buy every copy of that US News beauty pageant list and burn it. It’s nothing more than marketing hype shrouded in the illusion of unbiased objectivity.</p>
<p>I don’t condone Barker’s actions but to me the REAL problem lies with the nonsense that peer assessment provides anything of positive value when rating schools. I’m sure President Barker has a real sense of how students at many other schools spend their time eating their lunches together so he can compare that to Clemson. Right. </p>
<p>Further, USN&WR in a related article where USN&WR admits that they don’t check figures that colleges give in, just trust they are accurate. I’m sure there are a bunch of schools relieved to hear their BS isn’t being monitored or even spot checked. Just beautiful.</p>
<p>It’s accurate and credible if you take a sufficiently large sample size and you get a very good response rate like the USNews PA survey. (It’s still considered the best intangible measure available outside NRC rankings… which is why ppl still respond to it the way they do. The large sample size and response rate is why universities actually care about it and take it seriously.)</p>
<p>UNLESS! Everyone screws with each other… which I’m sure doesn’t happen very often… What incentives do you have to grade your peer school seriously lower than yours? Unless you have a pack of friends which is doing the same for you, you will simply be weeded out as an outlier under a huge sample size…</p>
<p>I’m iffy about the PA scores btw… It’s anonymous… you can do whatever the heck you want basically. I think the University Presidents take this very seriously tho.</p>
<p>“There is a limit to the extent universities will go to game the system. When I was department chair (at a large Midwestern state university) I sat through a meeting in which people were brainstorming ways to improve our US News rankings, including setting maximum sizes of some classes at 19 and compensating for this by increasing the size of other (more than 50-student) classes. I was appalled by the discussion and suggested semi-sarcastically that if we really wanted to improve our ratings, all we need to do was to become much more selective in admissions and asked if this was a nonstarter. The Deans rolled their eyes, briefly said this was politically impossible, and the silly discussion moved on…Our ratings by the way have been relatively unchanged (perhaps slightly lower) since this meeting.”</p>
<p>I personally believe university administrators (with the exception of some ppl) are very conservative and do not want to have this blow over into a ranking war. There is a point where you cannot pass or else it’s unethical or illegal and they know that.</p>
<p>I am pleased all of this is “gaming” information is finally coming out and I hope reaching a critical mass to once and for all bury USNWR (its only money maker are these inane lists). In addition to what’s going on at Clemson, I have maintained that any ranking system that has UC Santa Barbara, Irvine and Davis in the top 50 ranked over UT, UF, Penn State (flagship unis.), Tulane, GWU, and Miami, as does USNWR, is a joke. </p>
<p>These UC schools are gaming the system with their “artificially” high top 10 percent of high school class numbers. For example, Davis reports 96 percent, whereas Harvard reports 95 percent, Stanford reports 91 percent, Vanderbilt 80. This is juxtaposed with the UC schools’ low SAT/ACT achievement. Davis: average SAT1160/ACT24; Irvine: SAT1120/ACT24; SB: SAT1185/ACT25. By any reasonable standard these numbers are atrocious for purported top 50 schools. Ridiculous.</p>
<p>No, it gets a large response rate because it is 25 percent of the total value of a college’s ranking. Getting a large sample of junk is just getting a large sample of garbage. Is there any info to claim that USN&WR excludes data/outliers on Peer Assessments? </p>
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<p>I don’t think it’s fair to say that UC schools are gaming the system, I think it’s fairer to say that they get through a huge loophole when USN&WR isn’t smart enough to discount top 10 class rankings when there are mediocre achievement scores. Just like they don’t discount SAT scores at ‘SAT optional’ schools where obviously only those students with favorable scores will report them.</p>
<p>by “some” do you mean that they do the 1.5 x IQR stuff to determine outliers and throw all the outliers out or by “some” do they subjectively throw out scores?</p>
<p>What would you estimate are the chances that Morse’s employees did in fact review Clemson’s entries? Or the chances that any human being at Synovate did anything else than entering all Clemson’s data in the database? </p>
<p>I’d say between zero and nil!</p>
<p>And, fwiw, what would be the basis for USNews to reject the “opinion” of the esteemed Prez of Clemson? Is his “opinion” less valuable than the others who manipulate the results of the survey? Would Morse’s people kill the 10-15 five’s Clemson MIGHT have entered for schools such as HYPS or Berkeley? Would Morse delete two or three highest scores … just because? Yeah, right!</p>
<p>The reason why the respondents do not fear offering whimsical opinions is that they know they can get away with about anything in total impunity and … secrecy. At least, that is until from the inside lifts the veil on the “practices” and there is no way to deny the alleged facts. </p>
<p>So far we have only seen the top of the iceberg, and much more is to come. You can expect a lot more scrutiny from the press that had been very gullible in the past, and perhaps a growing sense of frustration from the general public.</p>
<p>I’d love it if this scandal sufficiently discredited USNWR rankings so people would start looking at the actual educations. But it’s not going to happen.</p>
<p>It’s OPINION xiggi. You really think that if the survey was conducted via open/public ballot over 2,000 survey takers would change their OPINION that much to affect the outcome?</p>
<p>Question: does anyone know when the peer assessment forms are due to USNWR? Or has the deadline already passed and the forms have been submitted? I’m just curious if there is still time left for Clemson’s “peers,” knowing what they know now, to let 'em have it (0s that is).</p>
<p>actually it’s on a scale of 1-5
hopefully the deadline has passed. I want Clemson to reach the top 20 this year and then stop with all this nonsense about “striving” to be a top 20 school…and giving the school a bad name in the process</p>
<p>UCB, while I do not think it would change their opinion (and knowledge) about other schools, I am indeed convinced that respondents would exercise a LOT more caution in answering the survey (or signing the survey filled by admins at the school.) However, that is only a small part of the problem with the integrity of the PA. </p>
<p>I believe that the survey should be more detailed and more targeted to actual peers of the schools polled. Reducing the scope of the survey to 25 to 50 schools and defining the questions to measure 5 to 10 metrics would transform today’s utterly manipulated and worthless “peer assessment” into something … valuable to all students and families. Adding the terms *peer *and *assessment *to the USNEws reputational survey is simply a huge misnomer. </p>
<p>However, it’s clear that this is NOT the goal and objective of USNews.</p>
I think the University Presidents take this very seriously tho.</p>