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Post by HoyaSinceBirth on Aug 21, 2009 9:46:09 GMT -5
Sorry right I meant 3hrs of class that's why they're 3 credits.
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RusskyHoya
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Post by RusskyHoya on Aug 21, 2009 10:39:59 GMT -5
The proposed change to the rankings that intrigued me a few years ago was the addition of a ranking by high school guidance counselors, a group who should be the best informed of anyone about the widest range of schools. How to accomplish that ranking (a small panel, a broad cross-section, every counselor gets a vote?) is a tougher question, but I was under the impression this was on the way. I have not seen the actual magazine this year, so I don't know if maybe they have added this component, but it does not seem like they have. They've added it as an extra feature, just not as part of the rankings: colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/national-counselor-rank
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Jack
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Post by Jack on Aug 21, 2009 10:53:16 GMT -5
The proposed change to the rankings that intrigued me a few years ago was the addition of a ranking by high school guidance counselors, a group who should be the best informed of anyone about the widest range of schools. How to accomplish that ranking (a small panel, a broad cross-section, every counselor gets a vote?) is a tougher question, but I was under the impression this was on the way. I have not seen the actual magazine this year, so I don't know if maybe they have added this component, but it does not seem like they have. They've added it as an extra feature, just not as part of the rankings: colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/national-counselor-rankGU 9 Carnegie Mellon 17 ND 20 Wash U 20 Rice 20 Vanderbilt 25 That's more like it. Now if only this carried as much weight as (ridiculous) peer assessment in the overal rankings.
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Post by reformation on Aug 21, 2009 11:15:45 GMT -5
reformation: What can Georgetown do to make it's undergrad academic program on par with it's academic peers? What are we lacking exactly? I explained in another thread a bit about how a psych class of mine with the chair of the psych department discussed the academic life report a lot. For the most part it seems that relative to peer institutions Georgetown Students appear to be studying less and yet getting higher grades. We discovered though that Georgetown Students are under-reporting their study hours due 1) to the poor phrasing of the evaluation forms( i.e we're supposed to be including time in class in the hours of study according the people who read the forms, but this isn't made clear) 2) apathy in filing out the forms( most students don't read the forms and just bubble in random numbers and don't realize their importance. This all leads to the perception of grade inflation at Georgetown, which I'm sure is part of the reason for our peer review status. What else needs to be changed besides things like this perception?( I'm not denying the existence of grade inflation, I just believe it is less rampant as it's being perceived.) Is it our lack of Majors? or what exactly? or is more just the nature of the type of student Georgetown attracts i.e. more students in foreign service, Peace Corp, TFA, less students applying to the top PHD programs Making our undergrad program competitive with peers is not about study hours or grade inflation(though grad schools will subjectively haircut your GPA based on how difficult that they think the school/your specific degree is--). I guarantee you that nobody outside Gtwn's knows or cares about the study hours issue--Gtwn shld care about academic rep however as it affects people who want to go to grad school. To answer your question directly, Gtwn needs to address course content, course sequencing and degree structures if they want to make the undergard program more competitive academically. From a practical perspective what the univ should do is look in "detail" at what its top competitors do in their comparable degree programs and adopt best practices where changes need to be made--its really not that difficult to do--its standard operating procedure at other elite schools--Gtwn just doesn't do it very consistently. Just to provide a bit of perspective on comparative course content Gtwn has a couple of new masters programs in Math and Intl History. While both these programs are fine, they are really taught primarily at the level of an advanced undergad program at har/Yal/Prin/Penn/Col/Stan/etc. Also, I'd say across the board there's a pretty serious lack of attention to quantitative + problem solving skills. Also on a relative basis Gtwn also has a lot of redundant classes on unique but pretty insignificant topics that are crowd the curriculum -using the net its pretty easy to compare classes at different schools-if you want a few I'd be happy to show you a couple offline From a course sequencing + degree structure point of view probably a lot fewer gtwn students write real thesis/conduct any real research though I know that the univ is trying to addresss this. The degree stucture at most top univ's would sequence courses to provide the students the background to write a good thesis/do real research when they are juniors/seniors-in order to do that however;, students need to take serious courses that introduce them to the methodology of their respective discipline when they are freshman + soph's--its hard to just start more rigorous stuff when you are a junior/senior especially when so many Gtwn students study abroad as jrs(which is a good thing). i suspect that cramming the theology/phil stuff into the first year has an effect on crowding out continuation of math e.g., which is not helpful for a lot of degrees/students as an example. Making positive changes to the undergrad program to make it a bit more challenging and competitive is not that hard; however, the admin has to decide to actually do something--not just "blame the students" for not studying--it also seems like they blame the students for grade inflation too--the students don't set the course content, sequencing, or degree structure as I outlined above. Fixing the problem requires admitting that there is a problem, which the Gtwn admin has a tough time doing. Other schools like a Northwestern, eg., are much more candid with students, alumni, faculty about where they stand on a relative basis to their peers have been much more successful than GU for instance over the past 20 yrs in raing both money and their academic profile.
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DFW HOYA
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Post by DFW HOYA on Aug 21, 2009 12:46:27 GMT -5
From a course sequencing + degree structure point of view probably a lot fewer gtwn students write real thesis/conduct any real research though I know that the univ is trying to addresss this. Good points in general, but I do not buy this research tact that some at GU suggest. It's not practical. I was in the business school-what "research" or thesis makes practical sense for an accounting major? Do we really expect a 20 year old to be turning in a document titled "An Integrated Maintenance, Overhaul, and Replacement Strategy for Equipment Subject to Deterioration, Obsolescence, Inflation, and Tax Effects By Individuals and Limited Liability Entities Implementing FASB 25?" A business curriculum (and I would offer, a SFS one as well) is not going to be guided by research and post-grad fellowship opportunities to be successful.
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Post by HoyaSinceBirth on Aug 21, 2009 13:09:46 GMT -5
but it does make a lot of sense for the College. One thing that we urged the Chair of the Psych Department to do was to reinstate the BS tract for Psychology. Most other schools you can earn a BS in psych. You can only currently get a BA at Georgetown. I'd like to see a lot more majors at Georgetown have to write a thesis. It's applicable to most of the Majors in the College.
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CWS
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Post by CWS on Aug 21, 2009 14:55:02 GMT -5
I just looked at the BC website out of curiosity, and they have more details about the breakdown of categories. See the link on overall rankings: www.bc.edu/We do pretty well on "Peer Assessment" (or, at least, we're up there with Emory, Rice and Vanderbilt). Shockingly well on "Financial Resources" (ranked 31) [Btw: to see this you have to move to the second page and then link up the lines with the right school]. We look bad in "Faculty Resources" (43); not sure what that measures, but I assume (hope) it's the fact that faculty salaries at G'town are a good bit below the norm, even below taking into account cost of living. The administration is trying hard to improve the undergraduate education experience. The provost has been spearheading a project on revising the undergraduate experience. . The "Executive Summary" was published this past March ("A Call to Action: Curriculum and Learning At Georgetown"; I've tried to attach this, not sure if it worked). The document is supposed to be a conversation starter for the larger G'town community in the next year or two. It was written by the provost office with feedback from the faculty on the committee. For me, virtue of the document is the emphasis on formation and education. A Jesuit, university education is not supposed to be primarily a pre-professional training, but a broad intellectual cultivation. This has always been an important element of Jesuit education, but it is also something that the higher education gurus are now calling for in recent critiques of higher education. In that sense, G'town is ahead of the ballgame. The best book on this, for any interested, is Derek Bok's "Our Underachieving Colleges." Bok is former president of Harvard, so his critiques are important.
Here's the google book URL. It might not work since it's so long, but it shouldn't be hard to find on the internet. I think Chapter 3 will give you an idea of his main argument.
tinyurl.com/nm5fc6
Chapter 2 looks at one important constituency in all this: faculty. One thing to keep in mind in critiques of G'town regarding its education is that there is a limit to what the administration can do, given the sensitivities over academic freedom. In faculty meetings I've been deeply impressed by just how much faculty care about the education of G'town students, genuinely care, but the reality is that as a collection, we faculty are hard to get moving in a new direction.
As this conversation expands to whole G'town community, I hope people give voice to their experiences and hopes.
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rosslynhoya
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Post by rosslynhoya on Aug 21, 2009 17:47:36 GMT -5
Why dont they ask high school seniors what they think about other universities. They have spent the last year and a half of their life finding out everything they can about school and have probably visited more schools than most provosts have. Given that it is supposed to be a list to guide high school students, basing the rankings on popularity among high school students doesn't make a ton of sense. Plus their votes are already counted in the selectivity rankings, at least to a large degree. The proposed change to the rankings that intrigued me a few years ago was the addition of a ranking by high school guidance counselors, a group who should be the best informed of anyone about the widest range of schools. How to accomplish that ranking (a small panel, a broad cross-section, every counselor gets a vote?) is a tougher question, but I was under the impression this was on the way. I have not seen the actual magazine this year, so I don't know if maybe they have added this component, but it does not seem like they have. I hate to go all geek on you but a revealed preference model would be an even better way to get an objective analysis of the relative quality of different schools. Presuming of course that students choose to attend the "best" school that accepts them, you look at students who are admitted and where they tend to go when given the choice. Aggregate enough the revealed preferences of enough students and you'll eventually be able to depict a meaningful set of relationships. In other words, it would be the academic equivalent of the RPI versus the current system which is essentially the Coaches Poll. www.nber.org/papers/w10803
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RusskyHoya
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Post by RusskyHoya on Aug 21, 2009 20:11:15 GMT -5
Given that it is supposed to be a list to guide high school students, basing the rankings on popularity among high school students doesn't make a ton of sense. Plus their votes are already counted in the selectivity rankings, at least to a large degree. The proposed change to the rankings that intrigued me a few years ago was the addition of a ranking by high school guidance counselors, a group who should be the best informed of anyone about the widest range of schools. How to accomplish that ranking (a small panel, a broad cross-section, every counselor gets a vote?) is a tougher question, but I was under the impression this was on the way. I have not seen the actual magazine this year, so I don't know if maybe they have added this component, but it does not seem like they have. I hate to go all geek on you but a revealed preference model would be an even better way to get an objective analysis of the relative quality of different schools. Presuming of course that students choose to attend the "best" school that accepts them, you look at students who are admitted and where they tend to go when given the choice. Aggregate enough the revealed preferences of enough students and you'll eventually be able to depict a meaningful set of relationships. In other words, it would be the academic equivalent of the RPI versus the current system which is essentially the Coaches Poll. www.nber.org/papers/w10803Without going into detail, let me just say that this statistical method is well-known and is utilized by admissions offices around the country, including Georgetown's.
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Post by reformation on Aug 21, 2009 22:35:55 GMT -5
From a course sequencing + degree structure point of view probably a lot fewer gtwn students write real thesis/conduct any real research though I know that the univ is trying to addresss this. Good points in general, but I do not buy this research tact that some at GU suggest. It's not practical. I was in the business school-what "research" or thesis makes practical sense for an accounting major? Do we really expect a 20 year old to be turning in a document titled "An Integrated Maintenance, Overhaul, and Replacement Strategy for Equipment Subject to Deterioration, Obsolescence, Inflation, and Tax Effects By Individuals and Limited Liability Entities Implementing FASB 25?" A business curriculum (and I would offer, a SFS one as well) is not going to be guided by research and post-grad fellowship opportunities to be successful. DFW, good point. I agree with you re: the B School and rsrch-though I disagree re: the SFS. The MSB has some pretty clear competitors-it should simply take an appropriate best practices approach like any business would--I've employed few MSB undergrads as interns recently and would offer that a better quantitaive sequence and probably more well thought out liberal arts(non business) integration in the curriculum wouldn't hurt-those are course content and sequencing issues, though as you point out they are not rsrch/thesis driven.
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Post by reformation on Aug 21, 2009 23:02:28 GMT -5
A Jesuit, university education is not supposed to be primarily a pre-professional training, but a broad intellectual cultivation.--CWS
I'd like to offer the following: 1)There shouldn't really be a conflict between academic rigor and broad intellectual cultivation, both are achievable simultaneously 2)There is no need to reinvent the wheel-checking out what others do and adopting best practices is a quick and practical way to achieve real improvements in finite time--Stanford B-school completely revised and implemented a new curriculum in slightly more than 1 year-it looks like Gtwn is looking at 5 yrs or so-Adopting best practices does not mean Gtwn can't try to innovate on its own, but I think its impt to recognize that very little change actually occurs in the absence of competitive pressure/goals.
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Jack
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Post by Jack on Aug 22, 2009 7:45:41 GMT -5
Given that it is supposed to be a list to guide high school students, basing the rankings on popularity among high school students doesn't make a ton of sense. Plus their votes are already counted in the selectivity rankings, at least to a large degree. The proposed change to the rankings that intrigued me a few years ago was the addition of a ranking by high school guidance counselors, a group who should be the best informed of anyone about the widest range of schools. How to accomplish that ranking (a small panel, a broad cross-section, every counselor gets a vote?) is a tougher question, but I was under the impression this was on the way. I have not seen the actual magazine this year, so I don't know if maybe they have added this component, but it does not seem like they have. I hate to go all geek on you but a revealed preference model would be an even better way to get an objective analysis of the relative quality of different schools. Presuming of course that students choose to attend the "best" school that accepts them, you look at students who are admitted and where they tend to go when given the choice. Aggregate enough the revealed preferences of enough students and you'll eventually be able to depict a meaningful set of relationships. In other words, it would be the academic equivalent of the RPI versus the current system which is essentially the Coaches Poll. www.nber.org/papers/w10803I am very familiar with that study and read it with great interest when it came out, but I no longer have a copy or any interest in paying to read it again, so I will say this from my memory of it: revealed preference is probably the best way to measure something that is not all that important to measure, and the work that went into the previous revealed preference survey was both arduous and probably incomplete, in that the sample they used was still a bit small and there were a few very strange results simply not in line with anecdotal experience (e.g. Boston College does not appear on the list at all, Wash U, definitely overrated by US News, appears down in the 50s, etc.). The time and effort involved in doing a comprehensive annual revealed preference ranking just doesn't seem worth it, especially to USNWR who sells plenty of magazines without nearly that type of investment, and if such a ranking were to become the standard it would seem to be a self-reinforcing list pretty quickly.
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