budlightgal

[budlightgal]

Grades show work ethic and skills at how to get ahead at the game.

It’s not a guarantee of success in later life. You won’t get promoted to senior manager b/c of your college grades. If you start your own business, you won’t get people to buy from you b/c you got good grades.

Grades help you start at a higher entry level. That’s all.

[budlightgal]

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Originally posted by lavelle

Hercules, you really need to do some research. I’m the editor who is responsible for b-school rankings at BusinessWeek. The last time we ranked full time MBA programs in 2004, we had more than 10,000 replies to our student survey. Since our methodology also incorporates two previous student surveys (3 in all) our ranking that year was based on nearly 32,000 replies going back to 2000–hardly “a few students…at one moment in time.” I’ll also point out that the student survey counts for only 45% of the final ranking. Another 45% comes from a recruiter survey, and the remaining 10% is from our intellectual capital rating–an analysis of every article published by every faculty member at every school in about 20 academic journals. All this information, by the way, is readily available in the magazine and online.

quote:

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Originally posted by hercules

Business Week: Base their rankings too much off what a few students think at one moment of time. Ranked Stanford #11 a few years ago. At least they are profitable at making the rankings look important and shifting the schools all around every two years. Thier book is a best seller.

WSJ: Pathetic. They don’t even understand their own rankings and never ran a sanity check on them. Look at how low Stanford is ranked. They probably don’t make money off the rankings and just make the rest of their organization look stupid.

US News: They act as if they have quantified the process and made it scientific. The writers did not do well/ would not do well on the GMAT with this flawed logic.

Financial Times: I’m not interested in European schools. No comment. Anyone else?

Business 2.0: Johnny come lately. Their rankings and explanations add nothing but confusion to what is already avaivailable. They appear to have a 100 year plan to become good and popular.

Jungle: See Business 2.0

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Louis Lavelle
Associate Editor
BusinessWeek

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Louis,

If your ranking incorporates the past 2, how come a school can hardly move for a while and then suddenly jump or fall tremendously?

I’d also love to know how Stanford ended up outside the top 10.

Someone I forget who said it best when they said rankings have to jump around to sell editions. You have tenured faculty and students who stick around for a few years. How can schools change so much in such short periods of time?

If the answer is that there is very little difference between them, then why rank them if it’s for some reason other than profit?

Amber

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