Gourman Report - How reliable?

ericatbucknell
Fri, 16 Jun 2006 17:47:24 +0000

collegehelp-

you managed to attack one of my comments. how noble. do i have specific evidence of false reporting of programs? no. has that specific criticism been made within the educational community since the 70s? yes.

which of my other statements are false?

it is statistically impossible to achieve the distribution of ‘scores’ that gourman reports.

gourman himself admitted he did not approach universities for data but rather relied on individual members of faculty and administrations for help. when asked for names, he provided two, one of whom when contacted admitted to have gone so far as to send gourman his departmental newsletter.

gourmans comments about overall rankings can be found in a 1997 article in the chronicle of higher education. the math is mine.

i also managed to find several different methodologies provided by gourman since 1978, all of which have differend from the one you provided.

last, refusing to publish specific criteria is academically dishonest. as a former member of the faculty at csu-northridge, gourman knew this.

does he nontheless manage name the top graduate programs in his rankings? yep. that doesnt seem to be something too difficult, however, since data for graduate programs is significantly easier to locate. and yes, undergraduate engineering and business rankings in usnews basically mirror their respective grad school rankings.

in short, im not sure how mirroring usnews graduate rankings makes gourmans conclusions valid. the same goes for alexandres. what we do have are statistically unfounded and impossible results that mirror graduate school quality. no more, no less. and if youre looking at grad school quality, why not look at the nrc and usnews results, which, though flawed, are honest for what they are.

valid? no more so than something i could put together in a day or two. in fact, i could probably do quite a bit better… and release my methods in the process!