College Calls It Quits From Famous College Ranking System

(Republicaninformer.com)- Due to “philosophical” issues, Harvard Medical School announced Tuesday that it was leaving the U.S. News & World Report medical school rankings.

According to the statement made by Dr. George Q. Daley, dean of the faculty of medicine at Harvard, the medical school will no longer submit information to be considered for its list of the top-ranked medical schools in the United States. The rankings’ methodology, which considers peer evaluations, residency directors’ evaluations, test scores, admittance rates, and student grade point averages, has drawn criticism; nonetheless, Daley claimed that his issues with the system were philosophical.

According to Daley, rankings cannot accurately reflect the high standards for educational excellence, graduate preparedness, and compassionate and equitable patient care that we strive to foster in our medical education programs.

“My concerns and the perspectives I have heard from others are more philosophical than methodological,” he wrote.

According to the report, Harvard Medical School is presently rated as the best medical school in the nation.

Daley said they have repeatedly indicated that the rankings should be one factor in a prospective student’s decision-making process because they are aware that comparing various academic institutions using a standard data set is difficult. “The truth is that U.S. News medical school rankings receive millions of visits each year from prospective students because we offer them helpful information and services,” said Daley.

According to Daley, the rankings encourage medical schools to provide fraudulent information about their data or give financial aid preference to students who perform well academically rather than those with more extensive financial needs. However, Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, the head of the medical school monitoring group Do No Harm, said that declining to take part in the rankings is a means to admit more students to meet a requirement for diversity.

For years, elite universities like Harvard and Penn, where I used to teach, have struggled with the U.S. News and World Reports magazine’s rating methodology for medical schools. He claimed that these medical schools had lowered their requirements to admit some candidates who did not take the MCAT to admit more students based on race. They would like to accept more, but the U.S. News Rankings forbid it without appropriately punishing their ranking.

Now Harvard Medical School can admit anyone on any criteria it wants and still claim to be the best.