We examined the influence of accountability on the consistency of peer ratings and quality of peer feedback by comparing three conditions: only rating accountability, only feedback accountability, or both rating and feedback accountability. From a large undergraduate course, 287 students' peer ratings and peer feedback were coded for rating…

University ranking systems influence a wide range of educational stakeholders, including students, faculty members, and campus administrators. Of these ranking systems, the "U.S. News & World Report" ranking of colleges and universities has been the subject of much research. However, little research has examined specific "U.S.…

Like other public workers, teachers typically receive high and compressed ratings that do little to differentiate them based on performance. Motivated by empirical evidence of substantial variation in effectiveness among teachers, there has been a recent push to develop more informative evaluation systems with greater ratings dispersion. We study…

This article analyzes the People's Republic of China's elite-making higher education policies that began in the early 1990s, notably with the 211 Project and then 985 Project, which led to the formation of the C9 League, a group of nine leading institution's dubbed China's "Ivy League." This elite grouping is compared with other Chinese…

This essay explores and examines how rankings and league tables have played (and continue to play) a major and consequential role in how contemporary business schools manage their affairs. It introduces and advances the proposition that rankings promote the short-term manipulation of public reputation (image) projected by business schools at the…

University rankings have been widely criticized and examined in terms of the environment they create for universities. In this paper, I reverse the question by examining how ranking organizations have responded to criticisms. I contrast ranking values and evaluation with those practiced by academic communities. I argue that the business of ranking…

Journal rankings are increasingly being used as proxies for assessing the quality and worth of individual faculty and their contribution to institutional performance. Problematic within this agenda is the historical mapping and projection of current journal rankings. Individual papers are being assessed against criteria far…

This study analyzed the effect that shifts in the U.S. News & World Report rankings have on input variables such as admitting grade point average (GPA), percentage of students taking the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT), average incoming GMAT score, acceptance rate, tuition rates, average student debt, the proportion of students with…

This article examines whether the way that PISA models item outcomes in mathematics affects the validity of its country rankings. As an alternative to PISA methodology, a two-parameter logistic model is applied to PISA mathematics item data from Italy and Spain for the year 2009. In the estimation procedure, item difficulty and dispersion…

This fact sheet finds that most states are shirking their responsibilities around two of ESSA's most important provisions for historically underserved groups of students: including student subgroups in school ratings and the definitions used to identify schools for targeted support. Is your state one of them?

The expansion of private school choice programs has been accompanied by a growing call for regulation of those programs. Individual private schools decide whether to participate in voucher programs based on expected benefits and expected costs. An unintended consequence of attaching heavy government regulation to voucher programs is that it raises…

When student achievement is assessed, we seek to elicit a student's maximum performance -- a goal requiring the assumption that the student is fully engaged. Otherwise, to the extent that disengagement occurs, test performance is likely to suffer. Effectively managing test-taking disengagement requires an understanding of the testing conditions…

The goal of this research is to examine the official yearly document, created by the State of Michigan, to officially rank all public schools from best to worst in our state, and offers an alternative way of evaluating these schools. For several years, between 2010 and 2016 the Michigan Department of Education had created a Top-to-Bottom ranking…

This article presents an overview of the popular rankings (US News and World Report, QS World Rankings) of U.S.-based library and information science (LIS) education programs and the shortcomings of each ranking. It calls for a new, more objective ranking of LIS programs that will more accurately assess quality and sustainability of these programs…

Have teachers become too dependent on points? This article explores educators' dependency on their points systems, and the ways that points can distract teachers from really analyzing students' capabilities and achievements. Feldman argues that using a more subjective grading system can help illuminate crucial information about students and what…