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Rank Order or Rank Odor

From today’s Sacramento Bee:

On the surface, it might seem self-serving for UC Davis School of Medicine to rip into the annual U.S. News & World Report rankings that rate it below the nation’s elite primary care schools. One might suspect it was sour grapes by a medical school unhappy with its rankings.The school poured four years of research and almost $10,000 of its own grant funding into a stinging academic critique of the news magazine’s ranking methodology.”These findings raise questions regarding the ranking’s validity and usefulness,” said the paper, published this month in the journal Academic Medicine.

A primary problem, the paper said, is that the magazine essentially is conducting an opinion survey. This results in wild swings in a medical school’s year-to-year standings…

The full story is at http://www.sacbee.com/2013/08/04/5622346/public-eye-uc-davis-study-challenges.html

The underlying study is at http://journals.lww.com/academicmedicine/Fulltext/2013/08000/Short_Term_Stability_and_Spread_of_the_U_S__News__.26.aspx

And the song is at:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uu5hzc2Mei4?feature=player_detailpage]

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