<p>just wondering what people think</p>
<p>UC Berkeley and SUNY Geneseo and UVA and UChicago. =)</p>
<p>^
Don't forget the best public: U Penn. :D</p>
<p>Like all colleges, professors at public colleges range from amazing and life-altering to so boring and incomprehensible you need a pillow for your pillow in class. I doubt anyone here can compare the professors at multiple public universities, and the sheer amount of generalization required to do so would make any attempt pointless.</p>
<p>There are outstanding teachers everywhere. The bigger factor is the quality of your fellow students. Teachers can adjust their teaching to different levels and cover different degrees of content, but they can't really go any faster than the median student in the class can accommodate. In addition, the richness of the dialogue between the students and the instructor helps instructors to teach more effectively.</p>
<p>Usually State schools, most teachers at my school come either from the state flagship or satellites.</p>
<p>In 1995, USNWR did a survey of academics and asked them their opinion of which colleges provided the best classroom teaching. I don’t know how much things have changed over time, but this may be one indication of an institution’s commitment to this.</p>
<p>Here are the full results for national universities with public universities in caps:</p>
<p>Rank for Classroom Teaching Excellence, NATIONAL UNIVERSITIES</p>
<p>1, Dartmouth
2, Brown
3, WILLIAM & MARY
4, Rice
5, Princeton
6, Stanford
7, Duke
8, MIAMI U (OH)
9, Notre Dame
10, Yale
11, U VIRGINIA
12, U Chicago
13, Emory
13, UC SANTA CRUZ
15, Vanderbilt
16, Boston College
17, Harvard
18, Northwestern
19, Caltech
20, Wake Forest
20, U NORTH CAROLINA
22, BYU
22, Wash U
24, Georgetown
24, Tufts</p>
<p>Great, once again hawkette brings up a survey that is almost as old as the high school student who might be interested in this question. This survey was done one time and abandoned, wisely I might add, by USNWR.</p>
<p>Rjko,
Somehow I suspect that if your U Michigan had been able to gain a ranking in the Best Classroom Teaching survey, you’d probably have a lot fewer objections. Anyway, thanks for reminding me that there are other sources that rate the classroom experience and how students feel about their professors. </p>
<p>Sparknotes provides some good data on student opinions about a variety of topics, including the level of faculty involvement at their school. Below are the results for colleges ranked in the USNWR Top 30 National Universities and again the publics are in caps.</p>
<pre><code>Rank, Students think faculty involvement is better than you find at most colleges , College , # of student responses
</code></pre>
<p>1, 79% , Wake Forest , 56
2, 74% , WILLIAM & MARY** , 52
3, 73% , Notre Dame , 105
4, 68% , Princeton , 40
5, 68% , Vanderbilt , 47
6, 64% , Dartmouth , 47
7, 64% , Emory , 36
8, 58% , U Chicago , 48
9, 58% , Georgetown , 66
10, 54% , Stanford , 50
11, 53% , Tufts , 30
12, 50% , U Penn , 54
13, 48% , Yale , 82
14, 44% , Wash U , 34
15, 43% , Carnegie Mellon , 23
16, 41% , Duke , 51
17, 40% , Brown , 47
18, 38% , Caltech , 13
19, 38% , U VIRGINIA , 52
20, 36% , MIT , 39
21, 33% , Rice , 18
22, 32% , U NORTH CAROLINA , 68
23, 31% , Cornell , 52
24, 28% , Johns Hopkins , 39
25, 27% , Northwestern , 45
26, 27% , USC , 64
27, 25% , Columbia , 69
28, 22% , Harvard , 217
29, 21% , U MICHIGAN , 95
30, 19% , UCLA* , 79
31, 16% , UC BERKELEY* , 58</p>
<p>*Responses are estimated at this level or lower. </p>
<p>**W&M is actually ranked 32nd in the USNWR National University rankings</p>
<p>I suspect the percentage of people who respond to such surveys greatly exceeds the percentage who have sufficient knowledge to compare many schools reliably.</p>
<p>There's a reason the rules of evidence exclude most hear-say testimony.</p>
<p>Hawkette is a convert. She now agrees with the PA. As such, we have no choice but to agree with the teacher assessment ranking. Of course, if she does not agree with the PA ratings, she obviously does not agree with the teacher assessment score.</p>
<p>No she doesn't agree with the PA ratings Alexandre because schools like Berkeley and Michigan are ranked highly there. It's as simple as that.</p>
<p>
[quote]
No she doesn't agree with the PA ratings Alexandre because schools like Berkeley and Michigan are ranked highly there. It's as simple as that.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Could it be that Hawkette does not agree with the PA because --contrary to many who frequent this forum-- she simply does not endorse a ranking solely because her favorite schools "earn" high marks. </p>
<p>Or could it be because, again contrary to many who frequent this forum, actually understand the elements that comprise the infamous rankings and undertand how much they differ from what they are SUPPOSED to measure.</p>
<p>Is it really as simple as that? And speaking about simplicity, would you accept the challenge of explaining in a simple statement what the Peer Assessment truly measures and subject your statement to the scrutiny of people such as me who would have a field day finding contradicting statements written by the same people who pretend to understand the value of the Peer Assessment. </p>
<p>For starters does the PA represent a meaningful measure of reputation, a measure of quality in education, or an abstract measure of the reputation for quality in education? </p>
<p>Have fun!</p>
<p>PS I encourage you to read the past posts written by the most vocal of the PA fanboys to refresh your memory and avoid some serious and unfortunate contradictions!</p>
<p>Without the PA scores public schools like Berkeley, Michigan, Virginia, North Carolina, et al would probably not even be ranked in the top 50 by USNWR for undergraduate education using the criteria that they think is so important. So you tell me xiggi, Would that type of listing be a correct analysis? Also when one looks at departmental strengths rankings from USNWR the names of Berkeley and Michigan constantly appear in the top 10-15 universities in the country. So that shouldn't account for anything either? Furthermore, hawkette constantly endorses a teaching assessment ranking that is not only almost fifteen years old, but shows HER favorite schools right at the very top. So I suppose one subjective ranking is better than the other, correct?</p>
<p>ok can we stop bashing Hawkette and get back to the original topic?</p>
<p>Which public college has the best quality of teaching and why?</p>
<p>by the way UChicago and UPenn are NOT public colleges lol</p>
<p>^
Shocking. Here I was thinking that UI-Chicago and University of Penn State were the best public Ivies.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Without the PA scores public schools like Berkeley, Michigan, Virginia, North Carolina, et al would probably not even be ranked in the top 50 by USNWR for undergraduate education using the criteria that they think is so important. So you tell me xiggi, Would that type of listing be a correct analysis?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I think they would easily keep a rank among the best 50 UG in the nation. If the schools you listed were to fall lower, then something really rotten would exist in the land of USNews. However, the fact that a ranking based solely on the PA would be strikingly different from a mix of the other metrics is sufficient ground to warrant questioning the basis used by the respondent to concoct the Peer Assessment. </p>
<p>My point is that it surely is NOT what USNews pretends it to be in its methodology, except for the part that it serves to inflate the scores of public schools via intangibles.</p>
<p>"My point is that it surely is NOT what USNews pretends it to be in its methodology, except for the part that it serves to inflate the scores of public schools via intangibles."</p>
<p>xiggy, I do not agree with your point. The USNWR is anti-public universities. If it could get rid of a criterion that would actually hurt public universities, it would most certainly do it with pleasure. How else can you explain a college ranking whose top 20 list is completely devoid of public universities? The USNWR keeps the PA because it knows that many people care about what the so-called experts think. Demand for a USNWR ranking sans-PA would most certainly drop.</p>
<p>And I do not see how a ranking of Teaching Quality (which Hawkette swears by), is any more "tangible", reliable or accurate than the PA rating.</p>
<p>Don't be so sure of that xiggi. The PA score accounts for a full 25% of the overall data that determines the USNWR rankings. I can easily imagine almost all, if not all, public schools falling out of the top 50 with that high percentage used. So which is it? Does USNWR rely on a rating that is overinflated such as the PA or perhaps, just perhaps, their criteria is so skewed to private schools that it obviously shows bias on their part. You can't have it both ways. I will say that USNWR must put a lot of faith in the PA ratings since they give it such a high percentage of their overall scoring. It seems the so called experts at college ratings feel the PA is very important, or as Alexandre put it, they are probably afraid what would happen if they didn't assign such a high importance of PA. No question it's all about selling their magazine! If anyone thinks that USNWR shouldn't use the PA as an indicator of strength of a school, I'd like to remind them that it's probably the main thing that gives any credibility to their overall rankings. Perception is reality. You can show all of the data you want to support a schools ranking, but when the so called experts are questioned and they give a 4.7 PA to a school like Berkeley and a 3.9 PA to a school like Notre Dame, you're not fooling them into believing which school has the "better" overall reputation.</p>
<p>
[quote]
which colleges provided the best classroom teaching
[/quote]
</p>
<p>WRONG. The magazine CLEARLY states that they asked respondents which schools have "an unusually strong commitment to undergraduate teaching."</p>
<p>That is not the same as asking which had the "best classroom teaching." It's a subtle difference, but makes a difference in how it is going to be interpreted. They could mean the institutions are known for having senior faculty teach a certain number of UG courses. They could mean the institutions have few graduate students. They could mean they have innovative programs and are testing new ways to teach calc or chemistry. It doesn't direct respondents to think about what faculty do in the classroom (although it's certainly plausible that IF respondents know that kind of thing, it will enter in their consideration) and it doesn't ask them to identify where classroom teaching is "the best."</p>
<p>They reported on a commitment to UG teaching. Not on the best classroom teaching. </p>
<p>There is no reason why you can't tell people exactly how the question was asked, since it's right there on page 140 of the 9/18/95 issue and I'm pretty sure I've provided this information for you before.</p>