Clemson Staffer Outlines College Rankings Manipulation 163
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.
Same thing happens with Law Schools (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Common (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Is anyone surprised about this? (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:So? (Score:3, Informative)
For example, to go up in the salary number, they RAISED THE SALARY. How is that cheating? Yeah, they had to raise tuition to do it, but it is not cheating.
Similarly, to get a better class size numbers, they horror of horrors, lowered the maximum number of students in several classes (countering this by enlarging the classes that were already large).
Now, I would not call the badmouthing of other schools to be a good thing, but it is hardly 'cheating'.
Summary Wrong (Score:2, Informative)
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'
TNSTAAFL (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:So? (Score:5, Informative)
And to generate a controversy on slashdot, you just have to lie in the article summary.
Look, I have no doubt that all kinds of universities do all kinds of crazy things to influence their rankings. But the summary gets a lot of stuff wrong.
For example, on the faculty salaries... Apparently, Clemson did two things. Firstly, they raised actual salaries, which would have a real and legitimate impact on their ability to recruit and retain outstanding faculty. Second, they corrected a previous under-reporting of compensation. US News bases its formula on total compensation (which combines salary and benefits), and apparently Clemson had been previously only reporting salary. (Here's the money quote: "Clarifying Clemson's approach after the panel for a reporter and an interested Robert Morse, director of data research for U.S. News's college rankings, Watt said that the university had added benefits to its faculty salary reporting to U.S. News after previously having failed to do so, as the magazine requires. So its jump came not from double counting or including information that it should not have, but from playing catchup." [source [insidehighered.com]]
On class sizes, the way Clemson "manipulated" the data was by... um, actually changing their actual class sizes. They made their smaller classes smaller and let their bigger classes get bigger, because US News uses thresholds of 50 in evaluating class size. Sure that helps their numbers... but it's also not a bad thing from a pedagogical point of view. With a discussion-oriented seminar, reducing below 20 makes a real difference. And with a big lecture, 55 versus 100 is not that much of a difference. So they might have actually improved their delivery of education.
As for the fake applicants mentioned in the summary, I couldn't find that in any of the linked articles. But one of the articles [nytimes.com] said that Clemson tightened their actual admissions standards (i.e., required higher high school class ranks and SAT scores). That isn't manipulation, that's objectively becoming a more selective institution.
The dirtiest accusation is that in the peer rankings, Clemson deliberately gave low scores to close rivals. If that was really done intentionally (which Clemson denies), that is genuinely dirty, but not terribly shocking. And that kind of a pattern should have been easily detectable by US News, if they had bothered to look for it.
Re:Why parent insightful? (Score:1, Informative)
http://jaydixit.com/writing/wellesley.htm [jaydixit.com]