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Clemson Staffer Outlines College Rankings Manipulation
xzvf writes "A disgruntled Clemson University staffer shows how US News and World Report college rankings are manipulated. Techniques include bad-mouthing other schools, filling out applications from highly qualified students that never intended to apply, and lying about class size and professor salaries." The school, naturally, denies that anything unethical went on. The New York Times has a more detailed article, which links to this first-person account of the presentation.
Raise your hand if you are surprised that this is going on.
Seriously, with all the incentive to attract and hold onto students and the funds they bring. Who would have thought that this is all above board and regulated?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=college+rankings+corruption+&aq=f&oq=&aqi=
It's not like this is new.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
water is wet!
Of course they cheat. They have to. If they don't know how to cheat then how can they catch the students when they cheat so they can cheat better and better so they can cheat into a job where others learn to cheat from them! /cheat cheat
Any time an important ranking system is devised, those being judged will figure out how to cheat the system. Given how important these rankings are perceived to be, this should be no surprise to anyone. I am more surprised this is a surprise.
20 characters max for the password? How will I use my favorite poems as passwords?
How is this surprising? It's difficult to fact-check a lot of this stuff, simply because there is no uniform way to measure it. It's like contrast ratio and response time for LCDs. Does anyone actually base their college choice on these rankings, anyway?
I am SHOCKED that anything unethical would go on in academia, especially with regards to admissions and maintaining image.
Surely this is all bullshit and academia is focused on teaching students, not patting themselves on the back and striving for U-peen and the subsequent moneys.
If there is a way to monkey with the rankings, schools will do it. USNews rankings are taken seriously enough where they should really improve their methodology so that it is at least more difficult to cheat.
Simply comes back down to schools are a business, even the ones that get funding from their State. Higher rankings means more attending students, and the ability to raise their prices and get more money. Plus there's the application processing fees, registration fees, and all the other fun BS. Who wouldn't expect them to bullshit their information to get more people to apply?
Back in the late 80s, Georgia Tech would have any incoming freshmen with lower high school GPAs start in the Summer quarter. This was under the auspices of giving those who were struggling, a bit more time to adjust to college curriculum before the incoming fall crush.
The interesting "side effect" was that the GPA of incoming Fall freshmen was thus higher, and the university had no trouble repeating that fact.
One alternative is to bow out http://web.reed.edu/apply/news_and_articles/college_rankings.html of the rankings game and take a principled stand as Reed College has done. One way of thinking about attending a fine school like this is that you "want to go to a school that isn't interested in selling out its education." Perhaps not surprisingly, US News didn't actually remove Reed from the rankings, they just ranked Reed (lower) with an incomplete data set. The other alternative could be called 'open source' ranking. The University and College Accountibility Network http://www.ucan-network.org/ ranks colleges in a common format, has useful information, and best of all, you don't have to buy a copy of US News to get the rankings!
I went to Yale so my biases may be showing but even in high school I never knew many students who paid that much attention to rankings when they were considering what schools to go to. It might make a difference if two schools were very far apart in the rankings but that was pretty much it. I And even then, that would simply be a proxy for one being a better school. Far more people cared either about the academics, the scholarships offered, and the location than anything else.
My impression is that the laws schools care a lot more about the rankings and that it influences people a lot more about where they are applying. (Not surprisingly one seems to see a lot more manipulation of the law school rankings than the undergraduate rankings). This care might be coming in part from the fact that employers such as law firms apparently care about the rankings for deciding whom to hire.
All of that said, if a ranking difference plays only a small weight on students' decisions it could still impact a lot of the students who were making knifeedge decisions about whether or not to go to a specific school.
About 20 years ago Playboy Magazine picked MIT as one of the top ten party schools. Rumor was that Playboy called some random dude on campus who listed out all the parties happening that year, making it sound like they were all happening that weekend.
I feel badly for all those kids who chose MIT because of its top-ten Playboy ranking, only to go and find a bunch of nerds, forever regretting not going to Clemson instead.
This brings to mind an article I read way back in Inc magazine where the author talks about how employees will figure out how game any system that rewards them.
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20081001/how-hard-could-it-be-sins-of-commissions.html
Clemson is just gaming the system, I imagine other schools that change quickly change their ranking probably are doing the same. Even if US News and World Report changes their ranking methodology, I guarantee that schools will simply change their tactics to beat the system agian.
bleuchez!
I've been working in academia for years, and gaming of the USN&WR rankings is hardly news to us. Talk to any college administrator off the record, and he or she can rattle off the names of peer institutions that are almost certainly fudging the numbers.
The USN&WR numbers are self-reported by each university, with no verification by the USN&WR staff. With so much funding and prestige riding on the rankings, who is surprised that some schools play fast and loose with the facts?
What is unfortunate is that USN&WR has manipulated itself into the position of being the arbiter of school "quality", through no other action than being the first to create the poll. A news magazine shouldn't have that kind of influence over the entire U.S. educational system, especially when it can't even be bothered to check the numbers that it publishes.
My College was always top on a list of Colleges that the highest percentage of alumni donating to the college after graduating. The rankings would score a college or university based on what percentage of alumni donated back to the school the first year after graduating.
My College found the simplest way to manipulate that index. Just have every single student who graduates donate one dollar back to the school and then find one or two students with extremely wealthy parents (this was not hard at my school) and have them donate thousands and thousands of dollars. This way the school would report absurd figures like "90 percent of students donated back to our school within the first year of graduating from our undergraduate program" and it would make the school look good and it would make the degree you just got look a little more prestigious. They never told the index that we only donated a dollar and were instructed to by some of administration.
And with the few giant donations from one or two individuals, the school could artificially say that the average donation was way higher than typical, while hiding the fact that it was offset by just one or two massive donations.
Other ways to cheat is hiring adjunct professors or part time professors under different titles like 'technician' or 'consultant'. This makes the percentage of full time faculty and professors look way higher than it actually is because the school hides its adjuncts under different titles. Another way they cheated the system was renaming classrooms as different titles. One of the rankings is how many classrooms on campuses have TVs/projectors/computers and if you hide the classrooms without those your percentages increase in your 'technology' score as well.
If I think of any more I'll them but these were the ones that came to mind immediately.
Not to spread doom and gloom but academia has been like this for a very long time.
Colleges and universities are struggling internally. On the one hand schools have to generate revenue which requires advertisement, marketing and "looking" better than other competing schools. On the other hand the primary roles of universities and colleges in society are to increase societies overall intellect and be a lightening rod for research, learning, and understanding.
The internet offers free access to knowledge and is stealing thunder from individual academic institutions. For example, I can communicate almost instantaneously with authors, researchers and professors and get an answer in most cases. I can view lectures and get materials on most subjects. Most educators/professors have blogs and some have tweets. We are not as dependent on academia to facilitate intellectual communication as we once were.
I have compared academia in the US, especially the Ivy League schools, to the luxury car industry. The information rumored in the original post enforces the legitimacy of my comparison. I recently read an small article on luxury vs performance that kinda applies to this topic.
Luxury is about appearing better. Performance is about being better.
Even if you're not going this far.... the business school at Wake Forest University a few years ago suddenly became a lot more selective and shrunk the number of people it would accept. The idea, I believe, was to increase the standings in various rankings. Of course, there were side effects of this, such as the economics department being flooded with people who didn't make it.... and it's not really good for the university as a whole, either... or "education" in the abstract.... It's going to look real good on someone's resume, though.
Typical principal-agent problem at work.
(Then there's the "omg new logo" debacle... gaak... and you guys wonder why I don't give you a $5/yr pittance to "improve your ranking" in the alumni-willing-to-give category)...
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
At no point in any of the three articles did I see anyone accused of "lying" about class sizes or professor salaries. The number of classes less than 20 people actually did increase--at least partly by bogus 'load balancing'. And the professor salaries increased, both by raising them in reality and because the old reported numbers didn't include benefits (as they should have).
I also couldn't find the source for the claim about filling out fraudulent applications, though it's possible I missed it.
None of this is to defend the ranking gaming, but the summary gives an extremely different picture than I got from the source material, which mostly is in the category of 'administering to the test'
I'm at a University in the UK. There are many students here on the MSc Computer Science scheme that can not program. Any language. At all. One of the group-work programming modules has been altered this year, so that rather than programming a solution, students can use Access / Excel / Word to produce the prototype of their 'system'. And as students might not find that easy, rather than do a presentation demo-ing their work, they can instead videotape the demo, allowing for smoke and mirrors tricks.
We have students with 80%+ plagiarism according to TurnItIn, and being let off with a slap on the wrist due to "cultural differences".
We have a Professors of Multimedia who can only code a web page when using Word 2003, and requires help opening Visual Studio solution files. We have lecturers who write down which files need to be moved to which folders, because they have yet to master drag and drop in Windows...
On the other hand, we have lecturers who are experts in their field. We have some young, highly knowledgeable and enthusiastic lecturers who know their subject inside out, yet don't for a second come across as arrogant. Who continue to be told "If we achieve less than 80% pass-rate on your module, it's your fault for not teaching the subject properly" despite the powers-that-be allowing students onto the degree who clearly have no skill with computers, whose only contribution to the School is 3x the normal annual fee.
The good lecturers get more work put upon them. The crap lecturers have told the-powers-that-be to sod off... so they are not given extra work any more. This gives them more time for leisure, recreation, and outside pursuits.
Sorry to rant... but for all the crap, I do love my University. I just wish the Executive, the Dean, the Associate Deans, and the Senior Lecturers cared enough to do something about it.
They don't.
This seems to be what happens when you introduce greed into a system. If education was free and universities were more specialised it may reduce this, still, the greed factor will always affect the system.
Maybe I'm too altruistic and this clouds my judgment of others, but I'd like to think that if there was equality of education there'd be less chance of greed in the system.
If education where free? You do know that there is no such thing as a free lunch? You have to pay teachers, administrators salaries and benefits, and that money has to come from somewhere. In the case of people how advocate for 'free' education, this inevitably leads to the government providing the education, and the government has to get that money from somewhere, and that somewhere is called taxation. Which again, does not make it free, it just appears to be that way.
If the US News & World Report model actually captures good things about a university, then what's wrong with attempting to match that model?
That a university tries to match what it considers a good model shouldn't be surprising. The validity of the model may be questioned. The methods to match the institution to that model may be questioned. But I don't see how attempting to get better under some model they consider good (by whatever criteria they pick) is bad.
I don't know enough about it to know if the USNews model is any good - maybe, maybe not. But I know that institutions I'm generally familiar with land about where I might expect in the rankings. Ivy leagues on top, small underfunded state colleges much lower.
Now, the claim that Clemson administrators purposefully rank other universities lower, that's a different matter. That is the most troubling claim to me in the whole bit. That action is highly unethical and I would be sorry to find out that it is true of Clemson, or anywhere for that matter.
Clemson is a land grant college in a small town, hence MooCow. The "GO COCKS!" was, I suspect, contributed by a student/alumnus/alumna of The University of South Carolina, Clemson's archrival and home of the Fighting Gamecocks. As an alumnus of South Carolina, I'll kick in an extra GO COCKS!!
Mel Elfin pretty much let the cat out of the bag. When asked how he knew that the U. S. News and World Report rankings were sound, he answeredthat he knew it because Harvard, Yale, and Princeton always landed on top.
In other words, the rankings are simply a way to give the trappings of science and objectivity to a system whose purpose is merely to reaffirm the conventional wisdom.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
So the students can go to the game on Saturday, go hunting on Sunday, and pick up trash along the highway on work days.
I think you missed a lesbo joke.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Here's some shit law schools have done:
Last year, Berkeley (#6) sent fee waivers to a ton of underqualified students. Students who would have never applied to Berkeley because applications cost money to submit. (Hence the fee waiver.) Underqualified students apply (because why not? it's free) and get rejected. Berkeley artificially deflates their acceptance rate, which helps their ranking score. This is likely done by a ton of schools. I just know of Berkeley doing it.
Another factor that affects LS rankings is the offer acceptance rate (basically, how many students who get accepted elect to attend that instutition). Schools will frequently reject obviously overqualified candidates because "they'll decide against going here and attend Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, Columbia, NYU, etc. instead." Thus, qualified students are rejected for being "too qualified."
Finally, schools like Georgetown (GULC, #14) used to admit a ton of transfer students and part-time students. Neither transfer students nor part-time students affected the LS rankings. Thus, GULC basically could accept many less qualified people, extract $100K from each of them over the next two years, use these extra millions of dollars to entice very qualified candidates to attend with generous scholarship packages (full rides and the like). Because these transfer and part-time students didn't affect the rankings, GULC was effectively using a money-generating machine to attract very qualified candidates who may otherwise have attended a more highly ranked school like Chicago. However, this year, the USNWR started including part-time students in the rankings. Transfers still aren't included.
Of course, the question remains: Does this matter all that much? When a law school like Yale or Harvard has so much money and prestige to leverage to attract the best students even if the students won't get a better classroom education there, aren't other schools equally entitled to game rankings that, at the end of the day, are pretty much bullshit anyway?
Look, I attended a top law school, but I'm willing to acknowledge that the rankings are almost completely meaningless outside of job prospects. The rankings do create some sort of "job prospect tiers." But aside from that USNWR rankings are crap (at least in law, I don't know about other fields).