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<p>A DIFFERENT and INDEPENDENT assimilation etc of the same data is not circular. That’s the whole point. It’s like asking several movie critics to rank the top 10 films of the year and averaging the results in some fashion; the redundancy of having multiple evaluations of the same data is not circularity (in fact, if it’s NOT redundant, there’s a problem), and it compensates for the biases of particular critics’ “weighting of factors” through the averaging. One can then take a 3:1 weighted average with box office receipts, actors’ salaries and other objective factors to produce a final ranking. That’s what US News does, and there is nothing in principle that makes such a procedure circular.</p>