<p>It’s accurate and credible if you take a sufficiently large sample size and you get a very good response rate like the USNews PA survey. (It’s still considered the best intangible measure available outside NRC rankings… which is why ppl still respond to it the way they do. The large sample size and response rate is why universities actually care about it and take it seriously.)</p>
<p>UNLESS! Everyone screws with each other… which I’m sure doesn’t happen very often… What incentives do you have to grade your peer school seriously lower than yours? Unless you have a pack of friends which is doing the same for you, you will simply be weeded out as an outlier under a huge sample size…</p>
<p>I’m iffy about the PA scores btw… It’s anonymous… you can do whatever the heck you want basically. 
I think the University Presidents take this very seriously tho.</p>