If you’re a student, playing the system is part of your day-to-day life. You talk in class for 10 minutes about the one page of the textbook that you actually read. You always speak last for in-class presentations so you can sum up what your partners have said. You up the font size of periods to reach the page limit for a paper.
Often enough, getting a better grade is a matter of acting like you know more than you do. You’ll find it either reassuring or deeply troubling to discover that university officials across the country are playing the same game.
The U.S. News & World Report university rankings are highly visible judgments of schools’ relative quality, and for programs and schools rising through the ranks, they often serve as bragging rights of sorts. So if you’re a university administrator, how do you juke the stats? You might follow in the footsteps of the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering: You might significantly over-report the number of faculty you have who are members of the National Academy of Engineering. It seems like a safe bet since U.S. News & World Report has admitted that it doesn’t try to confirm university reports on matters like National Academy membership.
But maybe you aren’t comfortable flat-out lying. In that case, just take a page out of the Clemson University playbook. Part of the U.S. News’ ranking depends on administrators’ evaluations of their peer institutions. James F. Barker, the president of Clemson, ranked his own school as “strong.” That’s higher than he ranked any other school, which makes sense, as long as you believe the home of the Tigers is better than Harvard, Stanford and Yale. That’s still in the realm of some pretty serious cognitive dissonance.
You could just play up to what U.S. News is looking for – like the proportion of classes with fewer than 20 students. That’s why Clemson has focused on cutting 20- and 25-student classes down to 18 or 19 students while letting medium-size lectures balloon. Much like the period trick you might use on an English paper, the ranking tricks are effective: Since 2001, Clemson has jumped from 38th to 22nd in the ranking of public research universities.
University President Mote would have you believe that he wasn’t playing the ranking game – he’s called not only the U.S. News report but also other college rankings “biased” and “bogus.” The university’s Strategic Plan tells a different story.
The words “rank,” “ranked” and “ranking” appear some 25 times in the document. Figures from U.S. News are repeatedly cited. The document’s own introduction identifies itself as “a ten-year road map for elevating its rank among world-class universities.” Later, the plan notes that, “Rankings are imperfect measures of stature, but in Maryland’s case they underscore an unmistakable upward trend.” In other words, rankings are bogus except when they prove how awesome we’re doing.
So what’s to be done? In 2007, about 80 university presidents gathered in Annapolis, with most of the attendees announcing that they would not participate in the “reputational” survey portion of the U.S. News rankings. Mote said that was a risk he wasn’t willing to take because even if the university didn’t participate in the survey, U.S. News would still list them in their rankings even without the university’s data. Trouble is, calling their system “bogus” from time to time doesn’t count for a whole lot if you cheerfully fill out their surveys and reprint their results in every promotional pamphlet. A recent op-ed in The New York Times called for the public release of college accreditation reports so that the federal Department of Education can serve as an independent evaluator of colleges and universities. It’s certainly a national campaign that merits support.
And in the meantime, go ahead and turn in that paper with 17-point font. Include “completed 75-page thesis” on your resumé. Because as Mote has taught us, desperate times call for bogus measures.
