Reply to Pervasive Myths - set the record straight

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]that northeastern gamed the system for rankings [/quote]

But that’s not a myth.  It’s actually true.  Took about 2 decades but they did it.[/quote]

You can call it gaming, but Northeastern looked at the formula and sought to improve where they could.  [b]A myth would be that no other schools did the same thing.[/b]  They might not have been as effective, but so many have.  Schools took steps to lower admission rate when it was a factor (by inducing applications through push marketing), class size (through registration cutoffs), student faculty (by counting faculty that are peripheral to undergraduate education), same with resources (counting resources in IPEDS, the government database used by USNWR, that are peripheral to undergraduate education), improving alumni giving rate when it was a factor by dropping alumni from the database to lower the denominator (I think Berkeley was caught doing this), influencing other voters like it is Eurovision, admitting students that don't count against stats (foreign, Spring, etc.).  There is literally no factor on USNWR that could not be "gamed" to some extent.[/quote]

NEU calls it gaming: https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2014/08/26/how-northeastern-gamed-the-college-rankings/

quoting NEU: "W[b]e did play other kinds of games,” [/b]he says. “You get credit for the number of classes you have under 20 [students], so we lowered our caps on a lot of our classes to 19 just to make sure.” From 1996 to the 2003 edition (released in 2002), Northeastern rose 20 spots. (The title of each U.S. News “Best Colleges” edition actually refers to the upcoming year.)"

quoting NEU: "There was one thing, however, that U.S. News weighted heavily that could not be fixed with numbers or formulas: the peer assessment. This would require some old-fashioned glad-handing. Freeland guessed that if there were 100 or so universities ahead of NU and if three people at each school were filling out the assessments, he and his team would have to influence some 300 people. “We figured, ‘That’s a manageable number, so we’re just gonna try to get to every one of them,’” Freeland says. “Every trip I took, every city I went to, every conference I went to, I made a point of making contact with any president who was in that national ranking.” Meanwhile, he put less effort into assessing other schools."

Quoting the article: [b]"but he had “gamed” the system as far as he could on his own. To break into the top 100, he’d need more intel on the news magazine’s methodology. He would also need U.S. News’s complicity. “We were trying to move the needle,” Freeland says, “and we felt there were a couple of ways in which the formula was not fair to Northeastern.” And so it was in 2004 when Freeland, a 63-year-old with bushy gray eyebrows and slightly unkempt hair, stepped out of a taxi near the waterfront in Washington, DC’s fashionable Georgetown neighborhood. With his head down, his lips tightly pursed, he marched into the red-brick offices of U.S. News, determined to make the rankings wizard, data guru Robert Morse, his accomplice.[/b]

[b]These are not things other schools do. [/b]
[/quote]

They absolutely are things other schools do.  [/quote] What other schools camped out to meet the US News reporter and wait and wait until they talk to them? [/quote]

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