Here's the 2011 list of the World's 101 Top Universities. Which rank # is your school ? Tell us

BA, 1

JD, 8

The top H.S. students want to go to the top schools becasuse of name recognition. Average SAT scores of incomming freshman and being selective pays a major part in your rankings. This same principle applys in attracting the most accomplished proffessors. Reputation and the money to game the rankings system puts and keeps you high up on the rankings lists. With that said, the top schools are very goods, but certain majors at those schools can be average.

There are lots of small private LA schools in the NE that are better than the Ivies in certain majors. These are schools like Swarthmore, Williams, Amhersh, Middlebury, Wellesley and Haverford, to name a few. If it was just based on acedemic rigor the ranks would be very different.

UC System wrote:

Looking at the list of colleges with the highest SAT scores provides a different picture than the Shanghai list.

Teach-to-the-test does not produce world class researchers and government contract laboratories. The University of California system years ago stopped relying on teach-to-the-test measures like GPA, AP, SAT, ACT, IQ, etc.

Are you retarded?

I do not know of any college that asks for IQ scores.

And GPAs aren't based on teaching to the test. That's the part that isn't teaching to the test... The smart kids do well on the standardized tests and have high GPAs. Try-hards have high GPAs, but low standardized tests usually.

what do you know wrote:

#1 Cal Tech wrote:

That's private closed survey by a English educatioanl foundation. It lists

#1 Cal Tech

but ignored UC San Francisco altogether.

Yep, different criteria, different weighting. UCSF is a med school so it's tough to compare it with Cal Tech.

Maybe a better way to look at the quality of undergraduate institutions is to consider where the very best students go - given they can go wherever they want.

Looking at the list of colleges with the highest SAT scores provides a different picture than the Shanghai list.

http://www.cappex.com/blog/blog/test-prep/top-40-colleges-with-highest-average-sat-scores/

That list is very inaccurate.

The 25-75th percentile for most of those schools is 2100-2300.

Trust me, if it were these, then there's no way my 2250 would have been rejected from Duke, UPenn, and 6 of the other schools I applied too.

A 2100 (good enough, according to this list, for the top 25th percentile at Harvard), is pretty commonplace. It's the 97th percentile which means about 41000 people scored that high in one year. Add in ACT scores, and you end up with over 70,000 people that should be considered to have a very good shot at admissions.

What about the United States Military Academy

It's become the United States Police Academy given soldiers no longer fight man-to-man and instead use stealth drones, robots, stealth helicopters, polar earth orbit satellites, and take two-years to surveil and execute S.W.A.T. operations with older career track soldiers.

HS Senior wrote:

Looking at the list of colleges with the highest SAT scores provides a different picture than the Shanghai list.

http://www.cappex.com/blog/blog/test-prep/top-40-colleges-with-highest-average-sat-scores/

That list is very inaccurate.

The 25-75th percentile for most of those schools is 2100-2300.

Trust me, if it were these, then there's no way my 2250 would have been rejected from Duke, UPenn, and 6 of the other schools I applied too.

A 2100 (good enough, according to this list, for the top 25th percentile at Harvard), is pretty commonplace. It's the 97th percentile which means about 41000 people scored that high in one year. Add in ACT scores, and you end up with over 70,000 people that should be considered to have a very good shot at admissions.

http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/highered/ra/sat/SATPercentileRanksCompositeCR_M_W.pdf

This fallacy of composition is what gets thousands of kids around the country in trouble every year- a school's median SAT isn't some sort of benchmark for admission(I bet Harvard rejects 10X as many 2100s as they admit!); it's just the middle of a very heterogeneous group. The numbers are brought down by- recruited athletes, legacies, URMs, or just anyone in general who has a "hook." I wished they published stats on admitted unhooked white and asian kids (might be literally something like- 3.98, 2380). That would give the majority of kids applying to these schools a much better idea of what they're getting into, and what their chances (or lack therof) are.

HS Senior wrote:

That list is very inaccurate.

The 25-75th percentile for most of those schools is 2100-2300.

Trust me, if it were these, then there's no way my 2250 would have been rejected from Duke, UPenn, and 6 of the other schools I applied too.

A 2100 (good enough, according to this list, for the top 25th percentile at Harvard), is pretty commonplace. It's the 97th percentile which means about 41000 people scored that high in one year. Add in ACT scores, and you end up with over 70,000 people that should be considered to have a very good shot at admissions.

http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/highered/ra/sat/SATPercentileRanksCompositeCR_M_W.pdf

Scroll down to the scatter plot for Harvard. There is a lot of variation. Accordingly, there were 2 individuals with SAT scores of 2400 denied admission while a few with below average SATs and GPAs were admitted. Clearly, there are other considerations for admission.

HS Senior wrote:

Trust me, if it were these, then there's no way my 2250 would have been rejected from Duke, UPenn, and 6 of the other schools I applied too.

Sorry, I meant to link to Duke in previous post. It looks like there were applicants with higher scores than you that were also rejected (and some with lower that were accepted).

Shanghai has the top research universities in the world. It's not a survey for HS admissions. I don't see HS Teach-To-The-Test aka SAT/GPA/AP as being a factor in their methodology for their survey.

Went to #001, and two others in the top 30.

University of Casual Sex and Booze #34 baby! how did this happen?

So when I was in high school, almost a decade ago, most kids from my school went to college. I went to an international private school outside of the US. The top students went to Stanford, Northwestern, Chicago, Princeton and such. Or a good liberal arts college. The next set of students went to places like Vanderbilt, Duke and a little below that was NYU, Boston College, USC, those types. And then we had people going to schools ranked anywhere between 50 to 100 in your US News rankings. And do you want to know where the kids who were below the 50 to 100 students went? They went to University of British Columbia. OK? UBC. Look, I'm sure UBC is good on the grad level and research level, but I've seen with my own eyes what type of students went there. They should not be on this list if that were the criteria.

My school is not on the list. Since I got a law degree from them, I'm suing for a refund.