Doctoral Program Rankings, Take Two

Responding to concerns about errors in its data, the National Research Council on April 21 issued corrections to the doctoral program assessment it released last fall (C&EN, October 25, 2010, page 12). The corrections, which include recalculated ranking ranges, address four types of mistakes, but not reported inconsistencies in faculty counts.

Rankings of chemistry and chemical engineering programs were largely unaffected by the changes. The revisions are still important because they improve accuracy of the database, which universities can use to compare programs, says Charlotte V. Kuh, the NRC staff member who directed the assessment.

NRC made adjustments to citations, faculty awards, first-year students with full financial support, and students with academic plans. But universities also complained of discrepancies in faculty counts, which affect multiple per-capita measures of scholarly productivity. Recalculating rankings with revised faculty data would be a huge undertaking that NRC doesn't have the resources for at this time, says Kuh. "What's more important is to update rather than rehashing old data," she says. NRC is exploring the possibility of future assessments, she adds.

The chemical sciences are becoming ever more interdisciplinary, so accounting for faculty contributions has never been more important or more challenging, says Daniel T. Schwartz, chair of the chemical engineering department at the University of Washington, Seattle, who alerted C&EN to the inconsistencies last fall. "It's disappointing" that NRC was unable to address faculty count issues, he says.