<p>Sorry, but i don’t think WUSTL should be ranked among CMU, UNC, and Wisconsin. I think it should at least be tied with UCLA.</p>
<p>Don’t worry. It doesn’t matter what we think. I am not even remotely qualified to determine any schools position on the rankings. I leave it up to the academics to decide whether or not UCLA is better than WUSTL. (UCLA is a top school)… though I have my biases… :D</p>
<p>I actually am remotely qualified to determine school rankings. Seriously though, there’s a million of these threads. Just wait for US News if you care so much.</p>
<p>Again, I’m confused as to why PY are somehow below HSM. This lists seem very engineering-heavy to me in focus. At the level of those universities, I wonder what your criteria are (non-rhetorical). I don’t see how the top five or six can be further classified, except by department. Am I missing something?</p>
<p>Maybe they’re trying to make a point about the Ivy League not being the best or something.</p>
<p>lol, Dartmouth '13… You haven’t even completed high school yet. Have you even gone to prom yet? You are not remotely qualified to determine school ranks. What makes you think you know more than say… me. You don’t. Just because I ■■■■■ CC forums with 1500 post count doesn’t mean I’m an expert at anything outside of JHU (YES, I know JHU inside and out and I read JHU Faculty Assembly and Academic Council meetings minutes for FUN on my own free time when I should be studying for finals… That is how much I know about my own institution. I simply do not have enough time (or drive/motivation) to read up on Rice, Baylor, UVa, UCLA, Wisconsin, WUSTL, and all these other great schools and have a life 
I am not remotely qualified to rank any school… simply because I am a noob. I’ll admit it. You are too!</p>
<p>It was sarcasm. Next time I’ll make a note with an asterisk, k?</p>
<p>^ yeah, srry to get all worked up about it. Good luck at Dartmouth, It is a great school. It was ranked alongside Cornell, Brown, and Columbia under HYSPM in my personal ranking (hehe, ModestMelody likes it of course since Brown is pretty high up there :D)</p>
<p>Haha thanks for the good wishes. I’m actually pretty nervous about going there(so far away and such a different culture) so I’ll need all the luck I can get.</p>
<p>haha, Phead, I like your point of view.
Of course, I have my biases, but don’t we all 
I say we create a large thread where we all agree that those top 25 schools are just the top 25, there’s no need to determine who’s 23 or 24 or even who’s 3 or 4. I’m fairly sure we all feel the same way about this. </p>
<p>After we all agree on this, we can then discuss USNWR rankings (people who actually spend a lot of their time researching these schools come up with these, so they’re probably more qualified than we are, haha)</p>
<p>Actually, a lot of people don’t feel like a non-ranked top-25 would be the best. Just saying. I personally think that we should cap it at top 11. ;-)</p>
<p>Why does it matter if it is capped at 11 or 25. Personally, i think considering the # of universities out there, top 25 is already a pretty elite group. The only reason you’d want to cap it off at top 11 is maybe because you have a sense of elitism. By a top 25 group, i don’t mean the top 25 are tied. I’m saying we all agree that they are the 25 (or 26, who knows) best schools, and that there is no real need to say who’s #3 or #4.</p>
<p>I do happen to like dijon mustard…haha.</p>
<p>Emory is number 1 and who cares about the rest :p</p>
<p>uh oh, i like dijon too.</p>
<p>O.K., here’s yet another ranking based on averages of 3 sub-rankings:
(a) the harmonic mean of the NRC departmental rankings
(b) a class size metric provided by Hawkette on the avg class size thread (aggregating <20, 21-50, >50 percentages)
(c) 75th % SAT scores</p>
<p>This outcome accords with my own intuitions fairly well.
The three sub-metrics capture what IMHO are 3 of the most important factors for excellence: academics (faculty, research productivity as judged by experts in each field), student caliber, classroom environment. In other words, the best schools are those that put great faculty together with bright students in small classes. “Great faculty” are not just great teachers (something I cannot measure yet but class size helps); they are major contributors to their fields.</p>
<p>Little issues remain such as how best to calibrate/normalize the individual rankings Example: use Z-scores to integrate Size/NRC/SAT ? I just calculated 3 ranks and took the arithmetic mean of those. But that does not grapple in a principled way with the different spreads. A huge increase in class size between NRC #10 and NRC #11 would not weigh any differently than a small increase. This could be important for tiering.</p>
<p>I left out MIT and CalTech. Too different. The Class Size metric produces wierd effects for these schools. </p>
<p>Rank School
1 Harvard,Yale
-------------------------------------------------- (Tier A?)
3 Chicago, Columbia, Princeton, Stanford
-------------------------------------------------- (Tier B?)
7 Duke
8 Penn
9 Brown
10 WUSTL
---------------------------------------------------- (Tier C?)
11 Berkeley,Northwestern
13 Cornell
14 Hopkins
15 Vanderbilt
16 NYU
17 Emory,Michigan
19 Carnegie Mellon, Rice
----------------------------------------------------- (Tier D?)
21 UCLA, Virginia
23 Wisconsin
24 Illinois, UNC</p>
<p>Not quite on the list of 25: Notre Dame, University of Washington, Georgetown, Cal SB
(with avg ranks of 27, 27, 28, 30 respectively).</p>
<p>1 Stanford
2 Duke
3 Notre Dame
4 Northwestern
5 Pennsylvania
6 Virginia
7 Michigan
8 Georgetown
9 UCLA
10 Boston College</p>
<p>My Ultimate Personal Top Ten</p>
<p>Personally</p>
<p>Tier 1 : HYPMS
2 : Caltech, Columbia
3 : Penn, Duke, Dartmouth, Brown
4 : UChicago, Northwestern, UCBerkley
5 : JHU, WUSTL, Georgetown, Rice, CMU
6 : Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, Emory, UMich, UVA, UCLA</p>
<p>Not a big fan of public colleges, even though I’m fully aware that they are great.</p>
<p>Mr-Amazing, my own latest ranking puts Rice in a tie for 19th. Not 190th. What objective, measurable factors do you believe should be considered in order to assign a more appropriate ranking to Rice?</p>
<p>If you examine my first ranking in post #23, you’ll see that I originally had Rice in a #2 tier, behind HYPS. My own intuitions going into this exercise would have assigned a relatively high ranking to Rice. When I gathered new evidence, built a model, and crunched the numbers, those intuitions were not completely confirmed.</p>
<p>But as I suggested in a more recent post, Rice is one school I’d expect to move up in the new NRC rankings when they are published. </p>
<p>I don’t know about anyone else, but I am not trying to bash or abuse any particular school. I do have biases. But I try to expose those biases by stating what my criteria are and how I measure them; then observe from comments whether the outcome appears to sync with general opinion.</p>
<p>Tk, the reason why class-size was not as sensitive as wish to be was due to its three-tiered setting. There are two ways to solve the problem: First, expand it to as many tiers as you break down in your current tier ranking. Second, assign more weight to it so that it can be as influential as the other two criteria. By the way, model calibration is performed by using other data. We should use other sources e.g. ARWU, THES-QS, and HEEACT to see if there are any big surprises.</p>