Slashdot Mirror
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?
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!
It's like contrast ratio and response time for LCDs. Does anyone actually base their college choice on these rankings, anyway?
Why, I chose the college with the fastest LCDs, something wrong with that?
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
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.
Because kids choosing a school based on Playboy's party ranking are the kind of kids that get into MIT.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
I don't know if you ever visited MIT in the 80s. The parties were definitely off the hook, and the girls coming in from Wellesley, BU, BC, etc were pretty amazing.
One thing I recall from the MIT guys I knew -- those guys were overachievers at everything -- academics, sports, leadership, and of course, partying. My exposure was limited to guys like that, so I don't know if it applied to the rest of the student body... but you should have seen some of the fantastic hack-engineering used to hide kegs, jello pits, etc.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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.
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.
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!
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).