What is difference between ivy league school and non ivy league?

[Shaun_W]

There is The Times and Guardian rankings every year which gives a broad amount of information (including revealing where universities are ranked in subjects, mostly the ones that are considered the "tougher" subjects, but not all) it's taken as if it is.

I am fully aware of newspaper rankings. They use a broad amount of data, most if which isn't particularly relevant to anyone, nor will much people attach the same amount of weightings to each bit of data.

Usually I tend to think averaging out the right wing Times and Left wing Guardian gives a good picture of how they are rated.

That's a silly thing to do. The position a university appears in a newspaper ranking is dependent on the data used, and the weightings given to each piece of data. Obviously The Times and Guardian use different data and attach a different weighting to each bit of data used, but that absolutely does not mean that the "truth" is somewhere in the middle.

Have you ever tried posting on a University forum during the time the figures come out.

What, you mean an internet forum comprised of a bunch of 17-21 year olds?

It's taken extremely seriously by everyone. Official or not everyone treats it like it is anyway.

No. The only people who give the slightest bit of a damn are A-level students and first years.

Both papers are fairly well respected journalistically as well, and they go to a great deal of trouble to rank the top performers, probably as much if not more than the government would go to if it had the means or political will to do so.

They go to the "trouble" of "ranking" universities because there is money to be made. It is as simple as that. Journalistic integrity does not come into the equation, as you may notice that it is not the newspapers themselves that do the ratings, but rather an external company. (See: how Exeter University ranks high in The Times, as The Times hires a company from Exeter to do the rankings.)

 

[bjnartowt]

UPDATE: I have been accepted to the University of Florida! I'm very excited to go there: 1) the TA's get to grade graduate level coursework 2) the professors seem smart enough to write their own physics questions, not just give questions already written in the textbooks, so I bet they really know the stuff! 3) I know the campus really well: I got my M.S. in engineering there a couple years ago. I have no worries that I'll learn the material "the right way".

: )