Just how ridiculous is Peer Assessment?

ohmadre
Fri, 17 Aug 2007 12:32:39 +0000

Be a little bit careful in sorting the columns in the online edition - Example: if you sort the SAT column, you are going to get a skewed view of that criterion - it will sort by the first of the two SAT scores given and give misleading results. For instance, based on combined SAT scores, Tufts isn’t higher than half the ivies as stated above. Still, it is certainly high and Tuft’s PA score, which seems much lower than it should be, really affects its rank.

And YAY for Richard Cook! Allegheny, and a good number of schools in its range, provide an excellent education - not that USNEWS devotees would ever know it. Each and every senior at that school is required to write and defend a senior year comprehensive paper and the quality of the faculty, and their devotion to students, the internship, research and service opportunies, are all excellent.

As is the case for a number of schools which fall below the top 50 or even 75 level. But the longer a ranking system like this exists, the more it becomes, to a degree, a self-fulfilling prophecy. As long as students, quite naturally, are tempted to measure their own worth by association with the highest ranked schools, they are going to over-look some excellent schools in their college search. Schools which were once lumped together in peer groups as “most selective” or “very selective”, are now given numbered rankings which imply a greater level of distinction than could possibly exist. And as a result, certain excellent schools have fallen from one level to the next because they can no longer attract top students, without any loss in quality of education - absolute or relative.

The most useful way to use the compiled information in the annual USNEWS rankings is on a column by column basis, and in association with other guides. That the most heavily weighted element of the rankings is a rating which is purely subjective, subject to manipulation, and hardly, as Richard Cook concluded, one which “peers” are universally qualified to make, has helped create artificial and in many cases, unfortunate, distinctions which, over the long-term, detrimentally affect some fine institutions and diservice students. But it is helpful to look at class size, faculty student ratio, etc. as part of the selection process.