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Mathematicians Deconstruct US News College Rankings
An anonymous reader writes "US News makes a mint off its college rankings every year, but do they really give meaningful information? A pair of mathematicians argues that the data the magazine uses is all likely to be at least somewhat relevant, but that the way the magazine weights the different statistics is pretty arbitrary. After all, different people may have different priorities. So they developed a method to compute the rankings based on any possible set of priorities. To do it, they had to reverse-engineer some of US News's data. What they found was that some colleges come out on top pretty much regardless of the prioritization, but others move around quite a lot. And the top-ranked university can vary tremendously. Penn State, which is #48 using US News's methodology, could be the best university in the country, by other standards."
Penn State, which is #48 using US News's methodology, could be the best university in the country, by other standards.
Was that standard "name which sound most like a Prison". Its good to get some measure of how good a team is but there are of course other approaches, one would be to have a league system with a set play-off format (rather than 100 "bowl" games) with a number if tiers, bottom few teams drop down a tier, winners of the various tiers below move up.
The whole point of the US News figures is that they are arbitrary, this isn't about really working out who is best over the course of the season its about having something to talk about around the water cooler, it would be miles more boring if you know that winning a game by 4 points when someone else loses by 2 means that your ranking goes up. You'd have commentators talking all the time about the "real time change" in the figures, it would be mind-numbingly boring.
Keep the arbitrary figures lets just have a proper league system instead rather than a flat "randomly play teams" format.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
George W. Bush graduated from Yale.
Percentage female. If you are going into engineering (face it, you are) try to get in to a liberal-arts dorm.
Where beer is Job 1
facts?!
didn't you mean
Until women were allowed into Yale
What?!