Talk:United States National Research Council rankings

message: Why does the 2005 ranking only include private schools?  The original NRC report does not make this distinction.  Surely there must be other sources that have taken the averages of the S-values and R-values of all schools?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.121.56.67 (talk) 21:40, 3 November 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: The article currently states that the report will be released in September 2008, however the NRC website says (updated September 24th 2008): "The release schedule for reports for the NRC Assessment of Research Doctoral Programs has changed.  The release of the Methodology Guide is now estimated for late October or early November.  The release schedule for the project report and its database will be announced when we have precise dates." - http://www7.nationalacademies.org/resdoc/Whats_new.html 78.86.101.116 (talk) 19:02, 25 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Release date changed 

message: Reinserted the tables showing the 2010 release rankings. The tables are calculated as described; they are simply the averages of the high rankings for the programs reviewed for each school.  All of the data is publicly available from the National Research Council's website.  Furthermore, many universities are using that exact same methodology (e.g. Harvard, Columbia and Duke) to summarize their standards in the review (refer to the unversities' own websites for press releases during the period after the release of the data to understand the institutions' own description of the rankings).  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.73.111.98 (talk) 20:12, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Given that the NRC deliberately avoided a single numerical ranking such as the one you describe (despite the ease of creating one), what you're doing amounts to a violation of WP:SYN. I am removing the tables again. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:31, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Tables

message: It may indeed by true that the NRC rankings have been "critiqued by a lot of people," but we must cite every assertion. The passive voice, weasel-like phrase ("The rankings have been criticized for X and Y") is not really great; we ought to state who is doing the critique, preferably directly in the text.
It is most helpful to our readers to state directly who made the proposition: "The 2010 rankings were critiqued by Jonathan R. Cole and the Computing Research Association." Such specificity is particularly important when objections come from particular individuals and groups who make statements that are matters of perspective. Of course, editors should feel free to add other referenced material dealing with criticism from other quarters. But it must be specifically-attributed and must not include vague terms ("The rankings have been criticized by X and Y," when criticisms X and Y came from a particular individual, organization, or community). 
(On a separate issue, the characterization of Cole's objections in the prior version of the article seemed not accurate, or at least imprecise: 
He objects to "faulty assumptions, poor analysis, political pressure from the academy, and unexamined preconceptions." This has nothing to do with "groupthink," which has a specific connotation, and in his essay Cole never uses the term at all. Neutralitytalk 09:10, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Re: References required for each assertion