Those Magazine Rankings: Let's Beg Them To Stop.
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the college choice process, students and their families need to research and evaluate colleges in order to find colleges where the student can maximize his or her chances for success. It is important for students and parents to understand their own needs and wants, understand the unique characteristics of some colleges, and make a list of colleges that would be good matches for the student. The emphasis should be on encouraging the student and family to consider the when researching colleges. If done well, the students will learn something about themselves and about the many educational options that are available. Counselors can tell when a student is using the college rankings in U.S.News & World Report. I hear comments such as: My parents only want me to look at tier 1 colleges; uncle said, `don't go there, that's a tier 2 college'; and is the top-ranked liberal arts college in the country? In the search for good information, many students turn to the rankings without fully understanding them. Good college help students find a good fit between the student and the college. Resources that rank colleges encourage students to look more at the label and not the fit. While many college admissions professionals strongly believe that students should not use the college rankings that appear in national magazines and books, the rankings continue to influence decisions and affect the college admissions scene (McDonough, Antonio, Walpole, & Perez, 1997). These rankings misrepresent the colleges (Hoover, 1996) and steer students toward making decisions for the wrong reasons, such as choosing a college solely because of its ranking and not the match for the student (McGuire, 1995). Many prominent educational leaders such as Gerhard Casper, the President of Stanford University, have criticized the rankings and their role in the college choice process (McKinley, 1996; Ray, 1997). Around the same time as these initial criticisms, school counselors received a letter from the Editor, Special Projects of U.S.News & World Report stating that the magazine had made an in its rankings which impacted the ranking of American University (M. Elfin, personal communication, October, 31, 1996). This error highlighted one of the many problems with the rankings. The problems with the rankings continued when in March 1997, The Best Graduate Schools misranked 44 law schools (Fallows, 1997). Fundamental Flaws In my view, the following are fundamental flaws in the magazine's rankings: * They attempt to quantify the unquantifiable (e.g., subjective phenomena). * They confuse selectivity with quality (i.e., low acceptance rates, high yield, and high SAT scores increase a college's ranking). To quote from Colleges that Change Lives (Pope, 1996): A Canadian once observed that the American practice of judging colleges by the academic records of the high school seniors they pick is like judging the quality of hospitals by the condition of the patients they admit. What happens during the stay is what counts (p. 2). * They use a formula that is arbitrary, subjective, and changes year-to-year (e.g., U.S.News & World Report admits (Wildavsky, 1999, p. 1] that it was a change in the rankings methodology that helped move Caltech to the number one spot this year). * They mix and, as a result, obscure helpful statistics (e.g., a statistic such as retention rate is important, but gets lost in the formula). * They use artificially aggregated variables (e.g., resources is a combination of student /faculty ratio, percent of professors with terminal degrees, percent of full-time faculty, average faculty salary, and average class size) and arbitrarily weighted variables (e.g., alumni giving is used as a proxy for alumni satisfaction and is 5% of the total score in the formula). * They assume that students will view the rankings critically and objectively when they may not have the emotional or intellectual maturity to do so. …
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.023 | 0.009 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it