<p><a href=“johnwesley:”>quote</a></p>
<p>I’m pretty sure if you look up the definition of “self-fulfilling prophecy” you come up with something pretty close to what you just said.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>So you can’t explain with any precision how the term “self-fulfilling prophecy” applies, right? Let’s walk through the logic and see what, if anything, is (according to you or other PA objectors) self-fulfilling and circular:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Unless the PA reviewers are answering based on the previous year’s US News ratings in filling their questionnaires, it is an independent evaluation. Nothing circular or self-fulfilling there.</p></li>
<li><p>As an independent measurement of (much of) the same thing that the objective part of the formula tries to quantify, PA serves as a “reality check” on the rest of the formula. Including PA prevents results that diverge too wildly from reality, and including the numeric factors prevents PA intangibles from being all-important. </p></li>
<li><p>PA aggregates, in a qualitative way, both the US News numeric factors (selectivity etc) and many others not on the US News list. The result is the average, across many reviewers, of THEIR weights on those factors, not the weights assigned by US News. As such it is, very literally, a counterbalance to the possible arbitrariness or incorrectness of the weights assigned by US News staff, including the USNews weight of zero for factors excluded from the formula. The overall rating is a weighted average (in the ratio 1:3, according to US News) of the PA reviewers’ and the US News statisticians’ judgements of relative importance of different ranking factors.</p></li>
<li><p>For PA to affect the relative ranking of two schools (moving a lower ranked college above a higher one) their PA difference has to be A FACTOR OF THREE out of whack with the combination of all the other factors, again assuming that the 25:75 ratio is an accurate description of US News’ procedure. In other words, that 25:75 is the ratio of standardized beta-weights or something that reasonably captures the true relative influence of these factors. So unless you believe the reviewers are, as a group, totally out of tune with reality or that the 25 percent figure is misleading, then PA is unlikely to skew the rankings, though it does balance them.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Do you agree with these points? If not, what is your specific objection to the above that makes PA “self-fulfilling” or “circular”?</p>