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.
So? (Score:5, Insightful)
And...? (Score:3, Insightful)
Schools == Business (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So? (Score:4, Insightful)
Any time an important ranking system is devised, those being judged will figure out how to cheat the system.
There's not much to figure out here. You just have to lie.
Hey Slashdot! How about... (Score:1, Insightful)
| FIX YOUR |
| FUCKIN' |
| CODE |
+----------+
| |
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People will game any system for maximum reward ... (Score:2, Insightful)
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20081001/how-hard-could-it-be-sins-of-commissions.html [inc.com]
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.
Re:Common (Score:5, Insightful)
No surprises here (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Schools == Business (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No surprises here (Score:5, Insightful)
USN&WR was just ahead of its time. Reporting without checking is all the rage these days e.g. blogging, twitter, opinion pieces and even a fair deal of what passes for quality journalism.
(I wish I wasn't joking)
Re:Playboy's Top Party Schools (Score:3, Insightful)
"The girls coming in from Wellesley ... were pretty amazing."
Um...
Cheating /and/ standards-chasing (Score:3, Insightful)
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)...
Re:Schools == Business (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
Looking through the comments, I see a lot of apathetic people talking about how obvious it is that this would happen, but I see no one talking about how to improve the situation (other than hinting that making education free would solve all our problems). We are in this situation because everyone just assumes it is the only way. Why don't people start thinking about how to change it? Keep in mind, though, that practical solutions are needed. A revolution in education funding isn't going to happen overnight.
There are so many intelligent people reading slashdot. It's sad that this isn't used as a forum for developing solutions. Instead it seems to be an outlet for apathy and pessimism.
Re:TNSTAAFL (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
Rankings are just opinions in disguise (Score:5, Insightful)
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 answered [wikipedia.org]that 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.
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
My uni regularly gets knocked down in the rankings because the average graduation time is a little less than six years. But the majority of students work full time! If you want to work and gain experience on the job and money while attending, we're better situated than 95% of schools, but that isn't taken into account.
There are just way too many factors to take into account, and personal preference should guide the decision, not the weird criterion that US News & World Report uses.
Re:In other news... (Score:4, Insightful)
Educating students about RL might do it. Get everyone to understand that for any skill that's difficult to measure, you actually don't want the number 1 lawyer, realtor, doctor, dentist, plumber, etc. You want someone who has a good reputation, but no more than that.
Whoever clawed their way to number 1 has very likely put more expertize into gaming the system than doing a professional job. While dazzling you with that number 1 rating, they will take shortcuts at your expense, and they will recklessly hustle you through their system as fast and cheaply as they can. If you complain, they will be ready to squelch that too. A useful contact at the BBB, a little bit of working that system too, and all record of your complaints will end up in the shredder. One acquaintance of mine retained the "best" lawyer in the metroplex for his nasty divorce, and was talking almost gleefully about how his ex was going to be squashed in court. Then he found out why that lawyer was the "best". The lawyer instructed him to lie in court. When he would not, the lawyer dropped him.
After a little preparation on what to expect, send students to at least 2 very different "big money" tournaments. It's one thing to hear about it, quite another to be the victim of cheating. It won't matter what-- chess, baseball, poker, pool, any kind of racing, whatever. All that matters is that there are big prizes. More participants than usual are sure to have a cork bat, marked cards, things up their sleeves, tricks, co-conspirators, a fix.
There's little else that can be done, and maybe only so much that should be done. Cheating and deceit is a fact of life. Biology abounds with examples-- parasites and mimics and sneaks, like the cow bird, the king snake, the blue-throated lizard. The incentive for such sharp competition can be reduced, maybe. Systems can be improved so they are less gameable. The goal isn't perfection, it's just to make the effort of cheating and the chances of pulling it off more and worse than honest training and honest victory. It's like the 2 campers being chased by a bear. You don't have to be faster than the bear, you just have to be faster than the other camper. And finally, don't go out of the way to play games that lend themselves to cheating. Perhaps the most surprising thing about all this is that US News has somehow managed to make their rankings so valuable, gotten so many to believe in it, that the schools are willing to get down and dirty over it.
Re:Raise your hand (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
That's how it used to be in the European systems. Since the Bologne Agreement, things have been set upside down. All the schools look to be trying to do the same things, poorly, and the curriculum appears largely dictated by external, short-term interests. Funding is no longer a block, it's per student with a bonus for each graduate. So god help the poor teacher that decides to flunk a student. The administrators won't allow that, it would reduce funding. Per student also means quantity over quality. While there are some talented students and others with potential, many are just placeholders. A few don't ever show up in the classroom even once, yet are on the books. That leaves the real students without a real student corps. Again admininistrators won't take the absentees off the roles, cause it would lose them funding.
The funding rules are currently optimized for a race to the bottom. Fix that first. There are still legimitate degree programs, with old-timers still in charge. But there are also many degree mills with an increasing number of "graduates" with "degrees". These will pool and come back later as faculty, but being weak will only hire even weaker candidates.
We've seen the result of such ass-hattery in Web development. It went from a skilled sysadmin / programmer and, later, HCI / information architecture to dorks that found a copy of a web editor and used social connections to scam jobs. After leaving a trail of failed websites and broken contracts a few years long, these become web design instructors who produce even less talented workers. Of course that is the worst case, there are talented people out there, but the damage done from the ass-hats cannot be denied. Just go to 5 or 6 random web shops and try to order someting or even price it ...
University funding is fairly easy to approach via game theory and debug. Fix the funding model and much of the fraud goes away ... over time. We could lose a generation.
Re:And...? (Score:3, Insightful)
Does anyone actually base their college choice on these rankings, anyway?
Yes. That's the really scary part: rather than actually research colleges a significant number of potential students and parents go through the list starting at the top. Others will basically apply to as many schools as they possibly can (which is getting easier to do) and go with the top-ranked school that accepts them.