Stanford Vs. Duke

Sam_Lee
Fri, 21 Apr 2006 10:53:42 +0000

bluedevilmike,

Hmm…you know what? USN actually places UPenn higher in “selectivity”. UPenn has higher % (actually quite a bit higher) of freshmen in the top-10% of their HS class. Why does Stanford has relatively low number in this category? Well, maybe Stanford doesn’t care as much about class rank; the school has lots of Division-1 athletes and most of them were probably decent students in HS but not in the top-10%. Even Stanford’s SAT range is higher and admit rate is lower and even we all know for regular applicant (non-athletes), Stanford is harder to get into, USN’s formula gives you an unexpected result. It’s about how much weight USN gives it. If I were the USN editor, I could give even more weight to class rank and Berkeley would be higher than Harvard in selectivity! Yes, it’s “quantitative” but it’s pretty subjective. It’s just like BCS bowl formula; LOL! Just because it looks quantitative, calculated by computer and has “computer rank”, doesn’t mean it’s scientific. Someone has to subjectively decide how much weight should be given to each factor (e.g. why does “faculty resource” contribute 20%, not 12.5% or 30%? It’s arbitrary) and what factors matter or not (why does the difference betwen actual and predicted grad rate matter? How is it “predicted” anyway?).