Peer And Self Evaluation - Indiana University: Fill & Download for Free

Not necessarily.I can think of one notable exception off the top of my head.Rose Hulman Institute of Technology, a small private college in Terre Haute, Indiana. As you might be able to tell from the name, it’s quite STEM-focused.Rose Hulman had about a 60% acceptance rate in the 2018–2019 school year. By the question’s implied logic, it’s probably not too stellar, then. The caliber of students wouldn’t be great, and the faculty and resources only mediocre. But, hey, a STEM degree from most anywhere can land you a decent job, so why not?In 2018, U.S. News & World Report ranked Rose Hulman the #1 Best Non-Doctorate Engineering college. For the 20th year straight.For the purposes of the general public, it has an “artificially inflated” acceptance rate due to its relatively “self-selected” applicant pools. Most students who want to major in STEM prepare in high school with a rigorous curriculum; those who are not good at math, for example, would hardly want to put themselves through the struggle of a four-year degree in engineering.Rose Hulman also pre-emptively culls out wholly unqualified candidates by requiring all applicants to complete a year of biology, chemistry, and physics each, plus four years of math. As such, it’s hard for many students to make Rose Hulman an “impulse application,” as a “why not?” Prospective applicants must also score a a 1050 composite SAT to apply.I will concede that in many cases, the previous conjecture about schools with high acceptance rates may hold true. However, there are factors outside of selectivity to consider when choosing a school to attend. Acceptance rate is only a measure of the spots available compared to the number of applicants. As another answer states, it’s a numbers game, and colleges looking for prestige definitely play it. I haven’t even gotten my scores for the SAT yet and I am already getting mail from universities who got my information from the CollegeBoard, trying to entice me to apply. The more who apply, the more they can reject, gaming the college rankings algorithms to be ranked higher and gain more prestige. These aren’t even the “elite” universities, it’s Arizona State and Northeastern.If you’re considering where you, personally, should apply, then selectivity should not be too big of a factor. It’s true that students want to interact with likeminded peers, and a lower acceptance rate creates the perception that only the “cream of the crop,” the smartest and most talented, can get in. Yet, consider that over half of applicants, to, say, Harvard, or any other elite colleges, are qualified for admission. There’s just so many of them that Harvard can afford to reject all but a few thousand of them. Trust me, there’s no shortage of smart people at most institutions in the top 100 or so universities in the U.S.Instead, consider the strength of the specific program, the faculty, resources, campus, etc.Application Evaluation Criteria | Rose-Hulmanhttps://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rosehulman-institute-of-technology-1830

Something people don’t know about academia is the standards of evaluation comes tenure review. That is to say, how the performance of a junior professor is assessed by senior peers to grant someone tenure (“a job for life”). Here is a brief description of what a professor must do everyday/every week to be tenure material.As an assistant professor on the track to tenure I will be evaluated a few years (5 -7, depending on the institution; 6 at Indiana University where I work) after you start. We call this “the tenure clock” and it’s the mental equivalent of sleeping with a 50 kgs backpack for 6 years. That evaluation is pretty thorough, and pretty hard. It’s not “just a formality” and good professors are made redundant because they don’t pass their tenure review. Two main groups up people will look at my “tenure package”. This package is a collection of everything I’ve done since I arrived at the institution, and constitutes the base to grant me tenure or to deny it. Other aspects pay into this decision, but they’re too many and too abstract to discuss here. This tenure portfolio is a qualitative and a quantitative database of my performance and it goes accompanied by different narratives where I connect everything I’ve done in a way that it all makes sense.My tenure package must cover three broad areas: Research - Teaching - Service. Teaching is relatively self-explanatory. We have classes to teach, we prepare them and we teach them to students who want to learn what we know. At a very basic level, that’s what teaching is about for a professor. However, research and service are completely unknown to most students and the general public. Let me explain them in some detail. Research is my area of “excellence”. In other words, when I was hired by my department, they did so expecting that I would produce cutting-edge research and position my name (and with my name, my university’s name) at the forefront of my field. In doing so, I am expected to become known nationally, give academic talks in symposia and conferences, and give workshops often. Colleagues and researchers from other universities working on the same area/subfield I work must have heard of me because of the quality of my work, and ideally, must have turned to it to clarify doubts or to explore certain topics. To get to this, I must publish. As academics say “publish or perish”. I must publish articles in academic journals such as The Modern Language Journal. Landing a publication in one of these journals in my field can take from under a year to three. That happens only after the study has been completed (from 3 to 20 months) and the manuscript has been written up (2 months - 6 months? often more). Getting a rejection is more likely than getting an acceptance letter, and acceptance letters often require changes be made to the manuscript. This processes of academic back-and-forth is really time-consuming. Other publications may include book chapters in specialized handbooks. In some institutions, these may not count as proper publications because they’re often “invited”, or because they are not examples of research but more like “systematic reviews” of a question or state-of-the-art types of papers. It is often advised to say no to this type of “offer” because they’re time-consuming but they hardly count towards tenure. On the other hand, if you are invited to contribute a chapter to a good handbook to appear under a great publishing house, saying no is simply hard, and you could be missing out on “being seen” and piggy-backing on some halo effect. I always have a minimum of three projects on the go, each one at a different stage. It’s a tough cycle. I won’t talk too much about other issues that are also central to research, such as getting money to do said research. Finding that money is… ermmm…hard. Applications must be submitted, evaluated and a decision must be made before you hear from the granting institution. That takes a lot of time. Much more often than not you’ll get a “no, but thanks for playing” for an answer. Enough of research and on to teaching.Teaching is, as I said earlier, about helping students learn. In research universities the quality of your research must be acceptable. In teaching institutions the quality of your research will define whether you stay or you go after your tenure review. In any case, it implies the creation of new courses, finding materials, designing evaluation tools, and ensuring that your students end up the semester being a bit more autonomous, more critical, and more well-rounded when it comes to the subject matter. Teaching requires many hours out of the classroom, as you hold office hours, do all kinds of paperwork, grading, fix jammed printers, etc.Service is evaluated based on your performance as a “good citizen”. Being a good citizen is a thing in academia. It means you do what you can to support the program(s) where you teach, the department(s) where you’re based, the school(s) where your department(s) is/are housed, and the university that employs you. As you can probably tell, all these are “institutional” structures, and that is why we call this kind of service “service to the institution”. What does this kind of service look like? being a member of a committee that ensures research with human subjects is done ethically (i.e., the IRB people), a committee that oversees the development of partnerships with other institutions, or with other departments. The committee that accepts grads students into the program. The committee that regulates certain type of activities. Other types of service include the organization of events on campus, charing conferences, advising the Spanish Club, mentoring /advising roles, etc. If the service does not impact the university but the field of work, we call this service to the profession. You can tick boxes here by being on journal boards, by being on national and international boards and committees, by editing a newsletter, etc. You may review submissions or grant applications. You can serve as a PhD dissertation committee member to a student from a different institution. As you can probably see, there are plenty of roles you can take. The goal here is to help. To make everybody’s life a little bit easier and to show that you understand you are one tiny piece of a big system.I hope this small overview of the three areas (which is by no means exhaustive) will give a more realistic description of the job of being a professor in a US research university.

In relation to what? And what do you mean by “good?”Overall, the first thing I had to do when reading this question is google “NYIT.” It shows that it’s not recognizable to most. Maybe employers in the New York area might know it, but frankly, out of the area, I would say very little do.I produced a piece on what colleges are the best earlier this year. I’ll copy and paste it here to help maybe understand what I consider at least is a “good college.”I’m sorry if you were hoping for “yes, it’s a good college,” but again, it depends on what you mean by “good.” It could be considered good to some, but overall, I am always looking at “the best.” So, please understand why my answer may be this way.Which Top American Colleges are Truly the Best to Earn a Degree in 2016?For over 20 years, I’ve analyzed the many lists and surveys* about the Top Universities in the United States and the World. A recent inquiry from one of our valued clients reminded me there is significant need to “educate” people in Hong Kong and the world about these rankings and share what I’ve learned. As a result, I’ve decided to aggregate some of my best advice and share it with all of you.It was incredibly important for me to spend this time finally because the landscape is confusing.As you can see from the listing in Wikipedia on College Rankings, there are 19 different rankings they list right away. And these are ONLY the global rankings.If you examine the Regional and National rankings, there are many separate articles that elaborate on how individual nations evaluate higher institutions of education. For example, 3 publications are known to rate colleges in the article on university rankings in the uk: Mayfield University Consultants have created The Complete University Guide, the top UK newspaper regularly publishes a College Guide and The Sunday Times publishes the Good University Guide (and note, this is only one of the 29 different countries they list).The USA has become known for Top UniversitiesAt the same time, the U.S. rankings have become almost the default list of schools for “the world.” As written earlier, the United States supposedly hosts many of the Top Universities. We explain how US universities outdo their european counterparts even using UK based publications. In the same article cited above, the US’s set of rankings was the most exhaustive. It listed 16 different sets of rankings plus a number of “others” which pushes the list to potentially over 20 that are “well known.”There’s the grandaddy of them all: US News & World Report. It’s been around since 1983. This list has so much power that Michael Luca in 2011 claimed that:“The ranking order of universities has been shown to have great effect; a one-rank improvement leads to a 0.9% increase in number of applicants.”In the most recent National Rankings (within the US), they listed Princeton University in New Jersey as #1:And their Top Liberal Arts rankings places Williams College in Massachussetts as #1:While the publication lists their methodology very clearly on their website, do you ever wonder if their location in New York city has anything to do with the fact that all 6 of these Top Universities are in the East Coast? Hmmm…However, if you look at the Top 5 Employers in the world, the #1 company is based in the west coast and founded by two “west coast university” grads. Hmmm (again)…Google was founded by two Stanford graduates. Why is this University which has the lowest admissions rates of all collegesfailing to place in the top 3 in the most recent “grandaddy of all rankings?” Shouldn’t the most sought after university in the world be #1?Also, if you look at the following wired magazine article which analyzes all the universities where Google employs its staff, you can see that it is definitely not Princeton. The schools that “feed” google are the likely candidates like Stanford & UC Berkeley or two other tech behemoths: MIT & Carnegie Mellon. However, UCLA grads also find a way to get into Google more than the average college graduate. However, if you look at the graphic and read the story, you will hear that there are a good number of x-Microsoft employees now at Google. Where do Microsoft employees normally graduate? Well, below, you will see some analysis on the UW and that’s where a significant number of Microsoft staff finished college.In 2003 through approximately 2006, I was the #2 sales person in a Real Estate office in Bellevue, Washington. I sold a $1.75 million dollar home to Adrian Beltre, an MLB all star. In the contract though during the sales process, the seller was this gentleman who was being recruited by Google. He was one of the top minds at Microsoft, but after I “googled” him, I found that the search engine company was being sued by the PC Operating system company for “stealing away” talent from the old wall street darling. Let’s just say it wasn’t going to be the only Microsoft employee that Google stole away. Hundreds, if not thousands of Microsoftees were becoming Googlers, but again, where did the Microsoft employees start? The UW.How about “Visvesvaraya Technological University”? Well, obviously IBM has or its HR recruiters. The graph above clearly shows many somewhat lesser known universities are still good to its graduates.How about Goethe-Univ Frankfurt am Main? The German University ranked #10 in a New York Times list which was compiled by asking recruiters from 20 different nations in terms of the “employability” of their graduates.However, what do “we” seriously mean by the “Top Universities?”Many people don’t realize that it’s not just what our parents or what our friends think are the top institutions of higher learning (unless they are heads of venture capital firms or managers of human resource teams).In actuality, what REALLY matters is what do recruiters or hiring decision makers think? In other realms like venture capital, what really matters is what do the people who are funding startups believe? And if you’re pursuing additional university education, what do the graduate school admissions folks believe are the top universities in the world. It doesn’t exactly matter what you learned, but it truly matters what others believe you may have acquired at your “high quality institution of learning.”So, the above list that identifies the German University should be taken seriously despite the lack of awareness of the institution listed at #10.Obviously, you have heard of the rest of the Top 10:HarvardYaleCambridgeOxfordStanfordMITColumbiaPrincetonImperial CollegeImperial College though? As an American, I didn’t hear about the University until entering the Test Preparation industry. So, despite its top ranking in the UK, is it a school I would take seriously as a Hong Kong or Asian parent?How about Penn State?Well, the Wall Street Journal published an article in 2010 asking which schools were the best according to HR recruiters. They ranked these as the Top Universities they would choose candidates:Penn State UniversityTexas A&MUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignPurdue UniversityArizona State UniversityUniversity of MichiganGeorgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech)University of Maryland, College ParkUniversity of FloridaCarnegie Mellon UniversityBrigham Young University (BYU)Ohio State UniversityVirginia Polytechnic Institute and State UniversityCornell UniversityUniversity of California, BerkeleyUniversity of Wisconsin, MadisonUCLATexas TechNorth Carolina State University, RaleighUniversity of Virginia (Tie for 19th)Rutgers UniversityUniversity of Notre DameMassachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT)University of Southern California (USC)Washington State University (Wazzu)University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (Tie for 25th)What REALLY matters as a parent?Another reason why it’s important for me to share this knowledge is because I am also a parent of two future college graduates. My twin boys are 14 years old and I want to give them the opportunities I didn’t have. For 20+ years, I’ve been questioned about my University degree. Despite graduating in the top 10% of my class, receiving multiple accolades and being a nationally ranked debater as a high school candidate (along with obtaining admissions into the #1 University in my area: University of Washington), I decided to attend the University of Puget Sound. The university was in the Top 40 Colleges that Changes Lives. However, it didn’t “change my life” because of its reputation. It changed my life because despite the hundreds of thousands I poured into the tuition and living fees, nobody recognized the institution after they asked me “What University did you attend?” I constantly had to justify my background and prove to my peers who I was. It made me work harder than most. It may have also slowed down my career growth along with limiting my opportunities due to the brand value.And while I want my children to work harder, I don’t want them to be questioned. As a result, I constantly look for the “better institutions” that will help them “open more doors” as I have for many of my past students who have gone onto Stanford, Yale,Seoul National University, Yonsei and many other top universities.So, what are the Universities that will open the doors? I would argue the number one factor is:#1 – Brand Awareness in ANY CountryAs stated earlier, it is critical for a company human resources recruiter or manager to recognize your university. Additionally, you should have “instant respect” from all the other decision makers in the companies or the folks who might be supporting your kids with future companies. Resumes are passed around inside companies when applicants are being screened. The talk many times will be”XYZ graduated from Stanford. We should look at her.” When someone asks “Where did you graduate from?” your answer should instantly garner attention.If your child was to work in North Carolina after college and then want to go and work in possibly Sweden for a few years, what University should she choose? What if she thought coming back to Hong Kong was ideal or maybe even making a pitstop in Australia for a few years? What would be the best education choice for her?Times Education has their “World Reputation Rankings 2015” which defines:The Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings 2015 employ the world’s largest invitation-only academic opinion survey to provide the definitive list of the top 100 most powerful global university brands.The list shows Harvard as #1 (and definitely not surprising):The other 4 on the list are obviously not pushovers for Universities, but again, the Top 4 outrank the University that is the hardest to get in (as far as the USA is concerned) and the one that significantly helped in producing what we all use to even find information about University rankings.For further support in terms of brands HR Managers or CEO’s recognize, using “big data,” The Global Language Monitor tries to:“…understan[d] that new technologies and techniques [are] necessary for truly understanding the world of Big Data, as it is now known.”The company has evaluated the top brands in education and have come up with “brand power” lists of the top institutions of higher learning. In a recent report, they quoted the book: “2016 TrendTopper MediaBuzz of the Top 419 College Brands, 10th Edition.” It claimed that public college brands are now dominating the upper echelon. While MIT still claimed the #1 spot, the following public universities landed in the Top 10:University of California, Los Angeles – UCLA (#2)UC Berkeley (#3)UC Davis (#4)UC San Diego (#5)University of Texas, Austin (#7)University of Washington (#9)In its own report, it evaluated “Big Data textual analysis based on billions of webpages, millions of blogs, the top 375,000 global print and electronic media, and new social media formats as they appear.” With this comprehensive gauge, it determined that the top 100 brands were:2014 Rank, University, Rank in 2013Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1Harvard University 2University of California, Berkeley 5University of Chicago 7University of Texas, Austin 8University of California at Los Angeles 14University of California, Davis 18Stanford University 4New York University 15Northwestern University 34University of Pennsylvania 11University of California, San Diego 19University of Washington 13Columbia University 3University of Wisconsin, Madison 16University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 25Princeton University 10Dartmouth College 73University of Virginia 32University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 23Yale University 6University of Minnesota 20Cornell University 9Michigan State University 31Washington University in St. Louis 47Georgia Institute of Technology 21University of Southern California 30Ohio State University, Columbus 12University of Illinois — Urbana, Champaign 26Johns Hopkins University 22Purdue University 28Indiana University, Bloomington 44University of Colorado, Boulder 43George Washington University 38Texas A&M University 40University of California, Santa Barbara 56University of California, Irvine 49Arizona State University 101Boston College 25Boston University 33Georgetown University 35Pennsylvania State University 39University of Georgia 29University of Iowa 36University of Pittsburgh 37University of Miami 45Iowa State University 64Florida State University 46University of Oregon 50Wake Forest University 94University of Missouri, Columbia 58University of Massachusetts, Amherst 66University of Notre Dame 42Rutgers, the State University of NJ 41Carnegie Mellon University 51University of South Carolina, Columbia 55Loyola University Maryland 79American University 70Oregon State University 60California Institute of Technology 53Duke University 24George Mason University 59Rochester Inst. of Technology 98Californis State U, Long Beach 141Virginia Tech 17Brown University 48University of Florida 72Loyola University, Chicago 80Vanderbilt University 57University of Connecticut 179Syracuse University 52Missouri U. of Science and Technology 72University of California, Riverside 69University of Maryland, College Park 63University of Oklahoma 93Brigham Young University, Provo 106University of Arizona 67Central Michigan University 54Washington State University 143Northeastern University 81CUNY-Brooklyn 121Villanova University 89Colorado State University 132University of California, Santa Cruz 68University of Delaware 74University of Rochester 62Howard University 84St. Joseph’s University 133Case Western Reserve University 76University of Tennessee 77Miami University, OH 89Southern Methodist University 87Emory University 71Stony Brook University 88Cal Poly—San Luis Obispo 139University of Alabama 116University of New Hampshire 95University of Phoenix 27University of Kentucky 75Binghamton– SUNY 130Unfortunately, lower branded universities are just not recognized. I saw an advertisement while writing article about the University of Sydney. They displayed a banner with the following:However, why would you want to brag you are 56th? It’s like saying I finished behind 55 others.So…What if my child was not destined to be one of the chosen 5% of Stanford or the other small percentage selected at the other top 4 institutions? Well, as an American and someone who’s focused on these rankings throughout all my career, the following will be a list of Universities that are “recognized” significantly throughout the world.Here are a golden 40 on top of the Prestigious 5 presented earlier (Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, MIT & Stanford).Golden 40 Top Ranked University BrandsThese should be strong enough universities to carry your child throughout life. Their brand power is above many of the ones listed already. The list is not in any specific order per se. However, there are some that might be considered a bit better in terms of brands:University of California, BerkeleyCalifornia Institute of Technology (i.e., Cal Tech)University of ChicagoDuke UniversityUniversity of Texas, AustinUniversity of California at Los AngelesNew York University (i.e., NYU)Northwestern UniversityUniversity of Pennsylvania (i.e., UPenn)University of California, San DiegoUniversity of Washington (i.e., UW)Columbia UniversityUniversity of Wisconsin, MadisonUniversity of Michigan, Ann ArborPrinceton UniversityDartmouth CollegeUniversity of VirginiaUniversity of North Carolina, Chapel HillYale UniversityCornell UniversityWashington University in St. LouisGeorgia Institute of Technology (i.e., Georgia Tech)University of Southern CaliforniaUniversity of Illinois — Urbana, ChampaignJohns Hopkins UniversityPurdue UniversityUniversity of Colorado, BoulderBoston CollegeBoston UniversityGeorgetown UniversityWake Forest UniversityUniversity of Missouri, ColumbiaUniversity of Notre DameCarnegie Mellon UniversityRochester Inst. of TechnologyVirginia TechBrown UniversityVanderbilt UniversityUniversity of Maryland, College ParkEmory UniversityUniversity Brand’s Impact – Case in Point, the University of WashingtonFor example, in many rankings lists, the University of Washington is not as visible as top ones like Harvard or even Northwestern. However, everywhere I’ve worked from Seoul to Shanghai to here in Hong Kong, the northwest school is recognized as a reputable alma mater. While the admissions rates there are higher than most of the Top 10 or even 20, it deserves its #13 ranking in the Global Language Monitor surveys.Why?Think about it. The first ever president of the United States was George WASHINGTON. The capital of the United States is WASHINGTON, D.C. Also, the University that is commonly confused with the University of Washington (Washington University in St. Louis) is actually quite strong. And since it’s confused with it, the UW gets credit for the latter’s success academically. Also, the Seattle based institution of higher education has received tons of money from its symbolic prodigal “son” Bill Gates. As of January of 2007 (8 years ago) the University received 242 million (USD) in donations and was collecting close to $1 million a day in donations. Also, as a very entreprenuerial city (home of Microsoft, Starbucks, Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more, Nordstroms, Brooks Sports, Costco, MSNBC, Nintendo, PACCAR, R.E.I., Raleigh, Expedia, Brown-Haley [makers of Almond Roca], Callison, Holland America, Alaska Airlines, Safeco, PEMCO, Getty Images, Jones Soda, Cray Supercomputers, T-Mobile, Weyerhaeuser, Zillow: Real Estate, Apartments, Mortgages & Home Values, ZymoGenetics), the city also produces many other future business leaders at a rapid pace. While quiet at times, it produces some of the most savvy brilliant minds including Gates (as mentioned) or Rich Barton. To top it all off, it also has one of the best Medical schools in the entire country.The other universities in the above list provide very similar value in their regions and throughout the world. In future posts, we’ll explain.#2 – Alumni NetworkWhy did Bill Gates become the richest person in the entire world (and stay there for many of the past 20+ years)? Well, it wasn’t because he was antagonistic like Steve Jobs. Many people attribute jobs as being one of the most brilliant people in recent memory in terms of the technology space, but I would argue it’s Gates regardless of his wealth.From the Wikipedia article about Gates:He is the son of William H. Gates, Sr. and Mary Maxwell Gates. Gates’ ancestral origin includes English, German, and Irish, Scots-Irish. His father was a prominent lawyer, and his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way. Gates’s maternal grandfather was JW Maxwell, a national bank president.I’ve told this story to many students in my illustrious 10 year teaching career. The main reason is because I point out that Gates was born with a “silver spoon in his mouth.” He didn’t rise from the ghettos of America. He went to Lakeside School – probably the best private school in the Seattle area. His father was the partner of a large law firm and as you can see from the Wiki article, his mom served on the Board of Directors of the United Way. At Lakeside, he met co-founder of Microsoft, Paul Allen. Allen currently is worth over $17 billion, the 38th richest person in the world. Before he dropped out of Harvard, he met Steve Ballmer who was CEO of Microsoft from 2000 to 2014. Basically, Gates networked his company into one of the most powerful companies in the world. Without being able to meet some of the brightest minds in the various education settings he had been connected to, he would most likely have found worst team members and possibly even failed.Harvard, Yale and the many others we’ve listed above have incredible alumni networks. They operate very tightly and filter one another by their own University degree. It’s not a bad filter given that many times their selectivity based on simply the university one attended does vet out very smart and talented people.As popular Harvard professor Steven Pinker wrote:First, an Ivy degree is treated as a certification of intelligence and self-discipline. Apparently adding a few Harvard students to a team raises its average intelligence and makes it more effective at solving problems. That, the employers feel, is more valuable than specific knowledge, which smart people can pick up quickly in any case.Did you know President Obama went to Harvard? How about his wife? Yes, Michelle Obama did as well. It probably didn’t hurt on the way to two terms of President of the most powerful nation on earth that many of his friends were Harvard grads and so were his wife’s.With this said, I would argue the following Top Liberal Arts Colleges also deserve mention:As we wrote before, the “Little Three Ivies:” Williams, Amherst, & Wesleyan.SwarthmoreBowdoinMiddleburyPomonaWellesleyCarletonDavidsonHaverfordVassarHamiltonHarvey MuddSmithWashington and LeeColbyColgateGrinnellBryn MawrColoradoWhitman