Take this ranking system with a barrel of salt

[wannabee]

Have you finished your applications? Are you pacing the floor or just plain bored? Here is something to keep you semi occupied for at least 10 minutes.

http://www.allourideas.org/poliscirankings

Note that they are asking about political science departments in general, not specifically graduate study. They threw up a number of foreign universities at me that I am simply not familiar with so I ended up choosing "don't know" several times.

You can also click through to the final results. Interesting how they compare to actual rankings like NRC or US News.

I am also surprised how quiet the political science forum is when compared with the posts for the past two years. Obviously, this is a dead time between applying and results. Still,in general we seem like a smaller and quieter contingent than 2009 or 2010 applicants.

Edited January 15, 2011 by cami215

[RWBG]

Interesting. The list mostly accords with my expectations as to how people would rank the schools (distinct from what I think the rankings should be.) However, I think Harvard's comparatively low position is interesting; my guess is they probably are subject to some anti-Harvard sentiment that comes from them being top-ranked.

Let's hope the quiet is a signal that there are fewer applicants competing for spots this year!

[balderdash]

Yeah, I think the ranking definitely has some "psh, I got to University of X, which is waaay better than Chicago" bias. But who knows.

[wtncffts]

Basically a glorified online poll, no merit in it but I guess it's sort of fun. I'm kind of surprised this (the site in general) got funding from Google and Princeton for what it is.

[Count de Monet]

The problem with polls like this is a lot of people don't know about "university X" so they pick some mediocre school that they do know about over it. Or they don't know much about either university and guess because one sounds better than the other. Or they go upon past reputations.

For example, University of Toronto is an excellent Poli-Sci institution, and I believe it has the largest Poli-Sci faculty in North America, but it's rated with Pittsburgh (!!!!!!???????) on this poll.

Another example is having to compare Claremont Graduate University to American University (as an example). Obviously American University being in DC should rank higher than Claremont...I mean, seriously? Claremont. They're good? However, Claremont has a wonderful reputation for theory, but most people don't know that so they go ahead and pick American University.

Finally there's the example of UC Berkeley. Berkeley was once a poli-sci powerhouse and pumped out good quality professors (especially in Theory); however, despite still having that reputation their faculty has really gone down in quality. People may pick Berkeley because it's a big name with a past great reputation.

[Zahar Berkut]

I'm curious to know if there's a rationale to the poll, aside from spittng out rankings based on nothing more than reputation. If you choose not to answer, the poll allows you to provide a fairly detailed explanation for why you haven't ranked a school. But as it stands, the selection of some universities is bizarre, and the poll does not seem systematic at all.

As an aside, what do you think are the most underrated schools (for PhD programs)? In terms of quality of instruction, faculty strength, and respect (though I guss respect and reputation are supposed to correlate?).