GRADUATE SCHOOLS National Research Council releases revised Ph.D. program assessment

Abstract

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, Oct. 25, 2010, page 12). Rankings of chemistry and chemical engineering programs were largely unaffected by the changes. But the revisions are still important because they improve the 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 its evaluation of 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 for which NRC doesn’t have the resources at this time, Kuh says. “What’s more important is to update rather than rehashing old data,” she says. NRC ...