US News Peer Assessment Rating Controversy At Clemson Part III

[ctyankee]

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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…

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<p>No, it gets a large response rate because it is 25 percent of the total value of a college’s ranking. Getting a large sample of junk is just getting a large sample of garbage. Is there any info to claim that USN&WR excludes data/outliers on Peer Assessments? </p>

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These UC schools are gaming the system with their “artificially” high top 10 percent of high school class numbers. For example, Davis reports 96 percent, whereas Harvard reports 95 percent, Stanford reports 91 percent, Vanderbilt 80. This is juxtaposed with the UC schools’ low SAT/ACT achievement. Davis: average SAT1160/ACT24; Irvine: SAT1120/ACT24; SB: SAT1185/ACT25. By any reasonable standard these numbers are atrocious for purported top 50 schools. Ridiculous.

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<p>I don’t think it’s fair to say that UC schools are gaming the system, I think it’s fairer to say that they get through a huge loophole when USN&WR isn’t smart enough to discount top 10 class rankings when there are mediocre achievement scores. Just like they don’t discount SAT scores at ‘SAT optional’ schools where obviously only those students with favorable scores will report them.</p>