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A Look at Stats From the Most Connected Classrooms Rankings
Tweet Share on Facebook October 27, 2011 Comment (1)U.S.News & World Report just released its first-ever rankings of Most Connected Classrooms.
More than 300 public high schools from U.S. News's most recent Best High Schools rankings returned questionnaires this September on their uses of online technologies. Each provided information about its Internet speed and wireless access; computer availability to students and faculty; additional tools including cloud computing and digital labs, and efforts to electronically engage students, faculty, and parents from their homes.
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5 Things I Learned in China
Tweet Share on Facebook October 20, 2011 Comment (8)I have just returned from the China Annual Conference for International Education 2011, organized by the China Education Association for International Exchange in Beijing. There were hundreds of participants, including educational leaders and other professionals working in the field of education from all parts of China and many other nations.
The presentations covered many of the crucial issues that will shape the future of education at all levels globally and in China, such as teaching innovation, improving STEM education, vocational and technical education, student mobility, continuing education, and cross-border accreditation. There were also many sessions dedicated to both national and global college rankings, how and why the rankings are done, and their implications for students, parents, colleges, governments, and society as a whole.
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U.S. News Education Team Introduces Academic Insights
Tweet Share on Facebook October 13, 2011 CommentTraditionally the U.S. News education team has solely focused on prospective students and their parents by adding features to our web site such as advanced search tools and College Compass. We've also added functionality that allows these same users to benefit from the power of social media. We are constantly looking for solutions that will enhance our offerings for the higher education community. In September, we launched a new product built specifically for those who work at higher education institutions: U.S. News Academic Insights.
For many years, schools have requested information on historical rankings and data for benchmarking and peer analysis, both at the graduate and undergraduate levels. Answering those inquiries has been difficult, time consuming, and, many times, impossible for our data team to accomplish in a timely manner. To promote easier access to our historical data, our product team has developed U.S. News Academic Insights. Our goal is to help colleges, universities, and graduate programs track and analyze their own data as well as the data of their peer group in a format that is easy to use and understand.
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Best Colleges Ranking Updates
Tweet Share on Facebook October 5, 2011 Comment (2)U.S. News depends on the schools themselves to provide accurate and complete data for the Best Colleges rankings. Where it's possible, U.S. News cross checks reported data and fills in missing data using other public sources, such as the U.S. Department of Education. When a school has missing data, U.S. News does make estimates of that data based on what was reported for that data point by other schools in the same college ranking category. Those estimates are used in the rankings but are not published.
It's important to note that if a school does not provide data, it can have a significant impact on its rankings when the value of its actual data would have been greater than the estimate we used. Here is one example from the latest rankings:
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University of Illinois Law School Admits to Submitting Inflated Admission Data
Tweet Share on Facebook October 5, 2011 Comment (2)In late September, University of Illinois posted a press release on its website that said "in an investigation into the past 10 years of University of Illinois's College of Law test scores and grade point averages (GPA), the ongoing University-initiated review has determined that inaccurate data were reported for four of those years."
The University of Illinois College of Law data that was reported inaccurately to the American Bar Association was for the law school's classes that entered in fall 2008, fall 2009, and fall 2010. This same inaccurate admissions data was also reported to U.S. News by the school and was used to compute our Best Law Schools rankings for the 2010, 2011, and the most recent 2012 edition, which is on our website now.
