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·¢ÐÅÕ¾: BBS ˮľÇ廪վ (Sat Mar 20 17:02:12 1999)
How we rank graduate schools
We want to provide you with tools for assessing
schools' academic quality
BY AMY E. GRAHAM AND ROBERT J. MORSE
Selecting the right graduate program requires plenty of data
gathering–from the schools and from professionals in the
field, alumni, professors, and students. The rankings of
America's graduate schools published in these pages are
designed to help you evaluate all that raw material. The tables
are filled with data that relate to academic quality–for example,
reputation ratings, test scores of applicants accepted, and
job-placement information. It's important that you use the
rankings to supplement–not substitute for–careful thought
and other research if you hope to find a school where you will
thrive.
To rank graduate programs in the five major disciplines that we
examine yearly–medicine, business, law, education, and
engineering–U.S. News uses objective measures plus two sets
of reputation ratings. In one set, deans and faculty members in
each field judge the academic quality of schools with which
they are familiar. U.S. News asks them to rate each program on
a scale of 1 (''marginal'') to 5 (''distinguished''). To minimize any
distortion from extreme ratings, we drop each institution's two
highest and lowest scores before averaging the responses.
The second reputational ranking is based on surveys of
people outside academia who are likely to hire new graduates
or come in contact with them in the workplace.
Superintendents from large school districts are invited to
identify the best schools of education based on their
experience hiring graduates, for example. Judges are surveyed
for their opinions of law schools. Practicing engineers and
recruiters are canvassed for their knowledge of engineering
programs.
The academic and nonacademic reputation rankings each
account for between 15 percent and 25 percent of a school's
final rank, depending on the discipline. Experts have long
considered reputation a valid measure of academic quality in
higher education, and we believe a diploma from an institution
known for excellence offers graduates a powerful edge in the
competition for good jobs.
Inputs and outputs. The statistical measures that account for
the greatest proportion of each school's ranking also are
indicators that researchers have associated with educational
excellence. These measures fall into two categories: inputs, or
the qualities that students and schools bring to the
educational experience, and outputs, measures of how
successfully the program prepared students for success. The
data are, with rare exception, collected from the schools
themselves.
The caliber of student that a program attracts–which influences
the academic climate–is measured by the average
undergraduate grade point average and standardized test
scores of the entering class. For education and engineering,
the Graduate Record Examination is used; for medicine, the
Medical College Admission Test; for business, the Graduate
Management Admission Test; and for law, the Law School
Admission Test.
Other input measures reflect outlays that affect the quality of
education. For example, engineering schools report their total
research expenditures as well as the number of faculty
members engaged in research. Law schools are asked how
much they spend per student on faculty salaries, libraries, and
student support services. (This year, we adjusted the law
expenditures for regional differences in the cost of living.)
To judge how capably a program develops its students, U.S.
News factors in as many output measures as possible: the
rates at which law school graduates pass the bar, for example,
and the median starting pay package enjoyed by new
M.B.A.'s, including base salaries, guaranteed bonuses, and
other forms of compensation. In collecting information, U.S.
News uses standardized data whenever possible. For example,
two years ago, a coalition of business school administrators
(the MBA Career Services Council) began asking schools
about job placement and starting salaries. U.S. News
incorporated the council's most recent versions of these
questions into the surveys sent to the business schools this
year. Similarly, we used language from the American Bar
Association's annual survey of law schools when we asked
the schools for their enrollment and bar passage rates. This
approach increases the likelihood that the rankings are based
on accurate information and that all schools report in a
consistent manner.
To arrive at a school's rank, we first computed the weighted
sum of the school's scores on each quality indicator. The
weights reflect U.S. News's judgments about which measures
of quality matter most. This year, scores for each indicator
were standardized before applying the weights. (This accepted
statistical adjustment, which recognizes that some indicators
vary more around their average value than others, ensures that
the formula weights are applied without distortion.) The final
scores were rescaled; the top school was assigned a value of
100, and the other schools' weighted scores were calculated as
a proportion of that top score. The scores were then rounded
to the nearest tenth and ranked in descending order. Detailed
information about the quality indicators and weights used to
rank schools in each discipline appears on the following
pages: business, 28; law, 36; medicine, 51; education, 66; and
engineering, 74.
Specialties. Beyond identifying the best overall programs in a
discipline, U.S. News ranks the top schools in some of the
larger specialties, based on the responses of academic experts.
Someone who hopes to practice environmental law, for
example, can view the top-ranked programs in that specialty.
Biomedical engineering? Click here to see the universities with
the best programs. In all cases, the schools verified their
specialty offerings in writing or, in a few cases, by phone.
Master's and doctoral programs in all other disciplines covered
in the guide–the arts, sciences, social sciences, library science,
and the allied health fields–are ranked only by reputation.
Again, U.S. News surveyed the dean or top administrator and
at least one other administrator or faculty member at each
school and asked them to rate the programs they were familiar
with in their particular discipline. The disciplines ranked by
reputation only are generally evaluated every third year; the
programs assessed this year include doctoral programs in
biology, chemistry, computer science, geology, mathematics,
and physics, and master's programs in library science. Data for
the rankings in the arts were gathered in 1996; for health, in
1996 and 1997; and for the humanities and social sciences, in
1997.
The quality of the rankings based only on reputation was
tested in 1997 when Evan Rogers of the Arizona State
University provost's office and Sharon Rogers, a
higher-education consultant in Virginia, compared the U.S.
News reputation rankings of graduate disciplines with those
done by the National Research Council, a private, nonprofit
arm of the National Academy of Sciences and the National
Academy of Engineering. Rogers and Rogers concluded that
''the U.S. News disciplinary ratings are just as credible as those
produced by the NRC using a much more elaborate
methodology.'' We trust you will find the rankings to be a
useful research tool–one efficient means of comparing schools'
academic strengths and weaknesses.
© U.S.News & World Report Inc. All rights reserved.
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