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A good education too complex to be reduced to a single number

September23

From CNN: The scandal engulfing Columbia University and U.S. News & World Report rose to a new level last week, when Columbia acknowledged that some of the figures it had submitted last year to U.S. News were inaccurate. U.S. News initially removed Columbia from its ranking entirely, then demoted it from second to 18th place after Columbia declined to submit this year’s ranking survey. The article that first exposed Columbia’s misrepresentation was written not by a disgruntled rival but by Michael Thaddeus, a tenured professor in Columbia’s own math department.

The Professor said, “The public was told for years, for example, that Columbia had a higher proportion of small undergraduate classes (those with fewer than 20 students) than any other leading university. In fact, Columbia’s proportion of small classes is the second-worst in the Ivy League, not the best as Columbia had claimed.

Likewise, our administration had claimed that the overwhelming majority of faculty on our main campus was full-time, but now we learn that this, too, was false. In reality, the numbers of part-time faculty and full-time faculty are almost the same.
U.S. News claims to determine the “Best Colleges,” but all it … makes no attempt to assess the quality of teaching and scholarship directly. For how could it? A good education is a subtle thing that is far too complex to be reduced to a single (ranking) number. The one-size-fits-all approach of the U.S. News ranking ignores the reality that different students have different interests and needs. Some favor the arts, for example, while others prefer the sciences, but the ranking makes no such distinction.
U.S. News says it relies on schools to report their data accurately. But asking schools to report unaudited data about themselves exposes them to intense conflicts of interest. Administrators are incentivized to manipulate figures, game the system, and focus on parameters of dubious importance while paying scant attention to what happens in the classroom.” [Wow, someone, somehow, got their data reporting all wrong?]
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y(y-8) = 9 –> y.y – 8y – 9 =0
–> (y-9)(y+1) = 0, therefore y = 9 (can’t have a distance of – 1 for the other solution for y)
Using the top and bottom of the rectangle,
x = (y-8)(y+2) = (9-8)(9+2) = 11
but, the left side = (x-4) = 11-4 = 7, but rhs = y+? = 9+?, which is greater than the value of the opp. side??
[I think that the left had side was a mistake and should have read (x+4)?]

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