StudentsReview OFFICIAL Rankings
New Years Day, 2005

About this College Ranking

65% - Creativity
10% - Competition & Collaboration
10% - Student Body
10% - Schoolwork is Useful
5% - Would Return again

Innovation 
Innovation is the conversion of educational knowledge into new opportunities, and new ways of doing things.  Pure education can become outdated, but teaching a student how and encouraging their creativity and innovation will provide them with returns for the rest of their lives.

Course Competitiveness 
While a certain amount of competition is a good thing, this metric measures the amount of “bad competition” — the kind that results in cheating, hoarding knowledge, looking over the shoulder, and the general kind that is counterproductive to the working relationships at highly profitable companies, or in effective management.  Effective companies and employees — and “people” in general are those that work together openly.  Cut-throat competition teaches a work ethic & mentality that is actually counter to success.

Student Body (reflected by ACT & SAT) 
In “schools to be aspired to”, as much of the learning takes place from the fellow students as it does from the faculty.  Student Body captures this, at least partially, through ACT & SAT scores, where the students were ambitious enough to insure that a standardized test score were as high as possible, to attend an institution with other ambitous students.

Schoolwork is Useful & Instructive 
Many schools give coursework for the purpose of delivering grades rather than the purpose of educating students.  Students have evaluated to say what proportion of their coursework is useful and instructive.  In the context of a good education, busywork does not assist (for the most part) understanding and competency in the workforce, and provides a mechanism by which grades do not match competency, harming students post-graduation opportunities.  The purpose of universities is to educate, not to babysit, nor to leverage customers for reputation.

Would Return (Overall Experience) 
All things stated, would the students choose to return?  This blanket captures things that all of our ratings did not, or could not capture.  Is there some unknown factor affecting why students would not return?

Filtering and Analysis
To find out how the data analysis was performed for the 2005 New Years Day OFFICIAL Rankings, including filtering, invalidity, weighting, distribution matching, and inherent biases, please go to 2005 NYD Rankings Explained.