Admission Sync

Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Introduction: Rankings of Computer Science and Engineering departments continue to be a contentious topic. What factors should be counted, and how should they be weighted? Ask a different person, get a different answer. Can we do better?

The answer is a resounding yes. We propose a simpler, direct, and likely more meaningful method: Google-based Ranking. By building on top of the years of technology put into Google’s novel PageRank™ algorithm, we can leverage the power of the Internet and deliver a complete ranking of the top departments in the field, all with the click of a button.

Methodology: We typed the following search terms into Google: Computer Science, Computer Sciences, and Computer Engineering. The second plural form of Computer Science was included because some departments (particularly the author’s own institution) are known as a Department of Computer Sciences for strange and historical reasons. We then copied the top 30 results, excluding links to Wikipedia and other non-academic institutions and advertisements, thus leaving 26 or 27 schools. The results are listed below. We include, for the sake of comparison, the most recent U.S. News and World Report rankings.

Results:

In these tables, schools that do particularly well in the Google-based Ranking system and not as well in the U.S. News Ranking are highlight in BOLD . Conversely, schools that do well in the U.S. News Ranking and not the Google-based Ranking are striked through.

We now focus on just computer science, as Google Trends tells us it is much more searched for than Computer Engineering:

Search Term Popularity: Computer Science vs. Computer Engineering

(Also note the scary decline in the number of searches about Computer Science)

We take the top 10 schools from the U.S. News Computer Science rankings and sort them by each of our Google Ranks.

U.S. News Top 10 Computer Science departments, sorted by Google: Computer Sciences ranking:

1. Wisconsin

2. Texas

3. Stanford

4. MIT

5. CMU

6. Berkeley

7. Princeton

8. Illinois

9. Cornell

10. Washington

U.S. News Top 10 Computer Science departments, sorted by Google: Computer Science ranking:

1. CMU

2. Berkeley

3. Stanford

4. Cornell

5. Illinois

6. Princeton

7. Wisconsin

8. Texas

9. Washington

10. MIT

Given this data, we now compute our own, novel AverageRank™ statistic, which simply averages the above two tables and ignores virtually all other data, in what some have called a “useless” and others a “flat out wrong” statistical method:

1. CMU

1. Stanford

3. Wisconsin

4. Berkeley

5. Texas

6. Princeton

6. Illinois

6. Cornell

9. MIT

10. Washington

Conclusions: From our study, assuming that Google “knows all” and is likely right, we draw three primary conclusions:

• Wisconsin is likely underrated by U.S. News. This result is no surprise, particularly given the author of the article.
• MIT and Washington are likely overrated by U.S. News. This point is probably more surprising. Perhaps scholarship such as this and this has led to the demise of these highly-regarded schools.
• Other schools are about in the right place. This point is especially true if you (1) ignore some results and (2) play with the data in an odd and unsound manner, using (for example) the much-maligned AverageRank™ algorithm.

Original Article available at

University of Wisconsin, Madison

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