(11-27-2013 01:31 PM)Shannon Panther Wrote: Any list that has the University of Tennessee above Carnegie-Mellon University is flawed beyond repair. Tennessee State is highly ranked despite being in danger of having their accreditation pulled by the Southern Association of Colleges and School. Call me unconvinced.
It's a particularly terrible way to rank schools because it completely ignores differences in applicant pools. Why do you think Oklahoma State, UNC-Greensboro, and Tennessee are higher than Carnegie-Mellon, William & Mary, and UCSD? CMU students are coming from all over the country and also applying to Ivies, MIT, and Cal Tech while students that are applying to Tennessee are largely from Tennessee and are also applying to, well, Tennessee. The applicant pools are completely different...about a 200 point difference in average SAT scores.
It's ridiculous.
There's no perfect way to compare schools, and it completely differs for any individual student. But probably one of the better ways to compare undergrad schools is to look at where the best students go, and the easiest, although still a flawed way to do that, is to compare SAT scores because at least they are standardized.
Top 20 SAT scores in 2010 were:
Cal Tech 1525, Harvard 1490, Princeton 1490, Yale 1490, Harvey Mudd 1485, MIT 1485, Chicago 1480, Pomona 1470, Washington St Louis 1465, Columbia 1460, Olin 1455, Stanford 1455, Dartmouth 1450, Northwestern 1445, Amherst 1440, Rice 1440, Notre Dame 1440, Penn 1440, Duke 1435, Swarthmore 1435.
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Is this better than US News rankings?
