Choice of a Graduate Program
If you are thinking of attending a professional school (law, medicine, business) after college, you are probably trying to decide which school is best for you. (If you aren’t thinking of going to a professional school, pretend for a minute that you are — choose one of the three fields listed above.)
i. To avoid anchoring, write down three or four of the most important objectives you have in this problem. How might you choose scales to evaluate these objectives? What sort of scales would they be? What units might you use (if they are interval scales)?
Turn your web-browser to
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/beyond/bcrank.htm. In the left-hand margin of the page, you will see links to "compare business schools" or "compare law schools" or "compare medical schools". Click on the icon that applies to you. You will then be asked to enter four graduate programs of your choice. Enter at least three, and click on the "compare schools" button at the bottom of the page. Answer the following questions about what you see.ii. What general categories of objectives has U.S. News selected in preparing this report? Prepare a list of four or five. Don’t consider specific sub-objectives like "% employed in manufacturing" — provide a more general grouping, more like your list of objectives.
iii. For each objective of your own, select a proxy variable from the data listed that you think best represents that objective. If your objective is not at all reflected in the objectives of U.S. News, you can add information from other sources and from your personal knowledge. Make a consequence table, as we did in class. Evaluate the four graduate programs by first doing a purely ordinal analysis, and then making tradeoffs as necessary. Come up with a ranking of the schools.
Now, go back to
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/beyond/bcrank.htm. Look up the rankings for graduate schools in your area of interest.iv. In what order are your schools listed? Is this different from your analysis? How do you think U.S. News weights its objectives, and how does this compare to your analysis? Do you think they’ve left out anything?
v. When you have finished (iv) go back to
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/beyond/bcrank.htm and look at "methodology" for the professional-school of your choice. What sort of weighting is this (linear, non-linear)? List examples of all the different types (nominal, ordinal, interval, ratio) of scales they make use of. Make a criticism of the paragraph on the "Reputation" component of the ranking. Does this component make use of a meaningful statistic?