Sociologists Find Fault with NRC’s Doctoral Rankings

According to an article on today’s Inside Higher Ed, sociologists are not happy with the National Research Council’s (NRC) doctoral rankings. Six months ago, the NRC released it’s much-anticipated and much delayed doctoral rankings report (see an earlier post here), but critique quickly followed suit. Much of the criticism pertained to the methodology and/or the data. Now the American Sociological Association (ASA) has released an analysis of the assessment. Among a number of concerns that were raised, fault was found with issues such as the exclusion of books and book citations as methods for evaluating faculty productivity in the social sciences, disregard for the quality of journal article publications, the lack of distinction between single-authored and co-authored papers, and the judging of admissions quality by GRE scores alone, ignoring verbal scores, which are a significant measure for American sociology departments. There is a concern that these rankings could have a negative influence on people’s perceptions of departments ranked lower than their actual quality and may lead to pressure to change programs to improve their rankings. The ASA’s report can be found here.