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发信人: haven (小小), 信区: AdvancedEdu
标  题: Methodology
发信站: BBS 水木清华站 (Thu Apr 30 12:37:02 1998)

   By downloading the Microsoft Excel files at the NRC web site and
   writing a few Fortran programs, I constructed various tables
   summarizing the report. I only studied faculty quality, since this
   seems most relevant to national visibility and I only studied the 136
   institutions (of the 274 in total) who received scores in at least 10
   of the 41 areas.
    1. I converted the raw score (each of which takes 4 columns to
       represent) to an integer scale of 0 though 9 according to:

Integer     Raw Score In
----------------------------
   0        not rated
   1        (0,1)
   2        [1.0,1.5)
   3        [1.5,2.0)
   4        [2.0,2.5)
   5        [2.5,3.0)
   6        [3.0,3.5)
   7        [3.5,4.0)
   8        [4.0,4.5)
   9        [4.5,5.0)
       This allowed me to devote only a single column to each of the 41
       areas instead of the four columns needed for the raw score. In a
       small number of instances, more than one program in an institution
       is rated in a single area (for example, Berkeley has both
       statistics and biostatistics). In these cases, I used the highest
       raw score of the programs in that area. Here are the 41 scores for
       Texas and Texas A&M:

Texas      6 7 5 7 5 6 7 7 6 0 7  7 6 8 6 6 7 7  7 6 8 8 7 0 7 7  7 8 8 7 7 0 8
0  7 5 6 7 6 8 7
Texas A&M  0 0 0 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0  5 5 5 6 0 6 4  6 5 5 6 6 7 0 6  0 8 4 6 5 6 6
7  0 5 0 4 0 5 4
       Thus Texas and Texas A&M are rated in 37 and 25 areas,
       respectively, with A&M rated in only one of the 11 Arts and
       Humanities areas. A&M has one 8 (Chemistry), two 7's (IE and
       Statistics), nine 6's, nine 5's, and four 4's, while Texas has
       seven 8's and 19 7's. The average nonzero scores are 6.78 and
       5.48, respectively, while for the 22 common areas they are 7.09
       and 5.32, with Texas having higher rating in 19 of the 22 areas
       and the other three areas having the same rating.
    2. From the 41 integers for each institutions, I constructed three
       summary measures and constructed lists by ranking by these
       measures:
         a. The number of areas receiving a non-zero score. This is an
            elementary measure of breadth of programs; Texas A&M has
            doctorates in 25 areas and ranks 51st by this measure.
         b. The average of the nonzero scores. This is a measure of depth
            of programs ; Texas A&M has average 5.48 (a rank of 48th),
            while MIT and Cal Tech rank 1st and 5th despite having only
            23 and 19 areas resectively. Texas' score of 6.78 ranks as
            16th.
         c. The average of all 41 scores. To rank high by this measure,
            an institution must be very strong in both breadth and depth;
            the top ten not surprisingly being Stanford, Berkeley,
            Michigan, Cornell, Wisconsin, UCLA, Texas, Columbia,
            Washington, and Illinois. Texas A&M ranks 50th in this
            category, with a score of 3.34 compared to Texas' 6.12.
    3. I have also included in the tables columns saying whether an
       institution is public (PU) or private (PR) as stated in Appendix E
       of the NRC report as well as columns saying whether the
       institution is a land grant (LY) or non-land grant (LN) as
       determined from a list available at www.reeusda.gov .

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