Viewpoint Doctoral Program Rankings for U.S. Computing Programs: The National Research Council Strikes Out

摘要

So how should the process work? Here are our suggestions: 1. Work with the relevant societies in order to generate metrics that matter to their constituents. 2. Realize that reputation does matter and include it in the metrics. There is an interesting feedback loop between rankings and reputation, of course. But this also means reputation has some validity as a measure of rank, so incorporate it. 3. Explore making the rankings subdiscipline-dependent. It is clear that different departments have different strengths. Thus, enabling a finer-grained assessment would allow a department with strength in a sub-field, but perhaps not the same across-the-board strength, to gain appropriate visibility. This may be particularly valuable for students deciding where to apply.