9 September 2001

 

To: What is Engineering? Section 3

From: Professor Schafer

 

Re: Addendum to College Ranking Lab

 

The instructions for the college ranking lab may be found online:

go to www.ce.jhu.edu/whatis3

select lab instructions

go to page 2 of the pdf file

select College ranking

or

go directly to http://www.jhu.edu/virtlab/book/labs/l11/col_ranking_lab.pdf

 

All of the lab instructions remain the same, except that instead of using the fictitious data given within the lab report you will use this year’s US News and World Report data in order to create your own College Rankings.

 

An additional note, you need to set the objective of your rankings as a group before you make them. Possible objectives include:

“To provide a ranking system to aid HS students in selecting an undergraduate school”

“To provide a ranking system to aid parents in selecting an undergraduate school”

“To provide a ranking of which schools provide the best academic environment” etc. etc.

Decide on your objective as a group and state this objective in your laboratory write-up.

 

Current data for the top 50 rankings by US News and World Report may be found online at

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/natudoc/tier1/t1natudoc.htm

 

You will want to highlight the data and paste it into Excel.

 

Now you need to clean up your data so you can actually use it! (a common 1st step in analysis)

Select all of your data

Then go under format cells, and remove all the fancy formatting (no borders, no patterns, center the text, turn word wrap off – everything!)

Now you need to manually add the column headings from the webpage

 

Note that student/faculty ratio is not right! You need to fix this. Excel has interpreted the data as a date, so highlight the column and go to Format – cells then the number tab and select date. Although the data now visually looks right, you cannot manipulate it. Insert a new column next to the old one and type in the ratio make 11/1 simply 11, 16/1 simply 16 etc., that is data you can use!

 

You may also want to fill in the US News ranking for those schools that have ties.

 

Now you are ready to work on your data.

 

Include no more than the top 20 schools for any graphs that you make.

 

Devise your own ranking system as discussed in the original laboratory handout.