Business Insider: Think there's a difference between the most selective colleges and those with the smartest students?
That's what Lumosity, a cognitive training site run by Lumos Labs, sought to find out with a series of games designed to test America's leading higher education institutions.
13 comments:
of course we are one of the 20 smartest colleges in America, we made the very first computer in the world! we have the smartest brain and more important, we have the theory, working to sky. Talent and hard-working are the worldwide element to be succesful and we get it all.
After reading the detailed study, I'm still unsure as to how these students were selected for the study. It says that the requirement was having a school email address - but how were they found? What was the sample major? The test was embedded in a video game...I have a feeling that there are probably more CS majors that would participate in this study than some other people in the student population.
Also, what schools weren't selected to participate in the study?
Finally, we get lots of lists that are the "best" or "smartest", but if you look more into the study, you can find some interesting rankings of focus, problem solving, flexibility and more. Essentially the more we beat my brother's undergrad, the happier I am.
It is always exciting to see Carnegie Mellon in any of these lists. It is a nice little boost to me ego to think that I go to know of the smartest schools, but I agree that I would like to know how these students were chosen for this study. I would be interested to find out if the majority of the students were a specific major. Of if they truly were able to spread it our between all different majors and types of people at each college. I always wonder how schools are chosen to be the best college and I find it interesting that in this study the best college is the smartest, so I guess they get it right sometimes. It would now be interesting to compare the list of the most exclusive colleges with the list of the best colleges and see if they match up.
Yeah I am going to agree with Ariel here and say that if your sample pool is drawn entirely from people who have elected to play a brain ability testing internet game, something in your results is going to be a little off. Seems like they could have taken a much more evenly spaced participant pool. I know that they've sampled 411 different colleges and universities, but the requisite of having previously finished five different brain testing games from this website just doesn't seem right. Although it's gratifying to see these kinds of lists published they really ultimately don't mean much of anything that is worthwhile. We see the expected colleges at the top, and the expected colleges at the bottom, and nothing new is actually learned.
when ever people her that i go to carnegie mellon theyre first response is always - wow you must be really smart- if you go to that school you're practically a brainiac. i always correct them in saying no- im there for the arts, however i am very proud to go to a school that is so well known for being smart wether or not its the 1st or the 17th its still really amazing to know that were on the list. However i do agree with Ariel that these tests are always generally taken by willing participants that mostly are probably geared to the test subject.
First of all Alex, us theater people are MAD SMART.
I would think that these students are chosen randomly, but I would also like to know what the exact raneg of colleges this study looked at, because the results were really sterotypical, even though of course I am loving that Carnegie Mellon is on the list. Also I find it interesting that people's basic skills were tested and not their basic knowledge of a subject.
After taking AP Statistics last year, I'm always a little bit wary when it comes to these type of ranking articles. The sample pool for this seems entirely voluntary, which will introduces a bias into the data collected. I like being ranked among the smartest universities as much as the next guy, but I'm still quite curious as to the method the study was conducted in.
It is great to read of a ranking that is not just based on testing, but also being on the ground and asking the students question and make them think on their feet. I am glad to hear that CMU is on this list. Also it makes me wonder what portion of the student body where surveyed. When did they do this, because it could totally change based on the major that the student has, and also if they are graduate level or undergrad. I hope that the big magazines think about doing rankings based on information like this not just on numbers and other things that have little to no sense of the student body and what they are like.
I agree with many of the above comments that the methods of collecting don't seem to be exactly sound. In fact, I've found that to be true about most of these kinds of lists. Every year new versions of these same exact lists are released from tons of different companies and they really don't serve to provide any new information. These lists are fun to look at if you go to one of the schools on them, but it's possible to find a list that has the result that you're looking for regardless of what that is because of the sheer quantity of lists with poor research methods.
Of course I am proud that Carnegie Mellon makes it onto this list, but I am also glad that someone has found a new way to rank schools based off of something besides standardized test scores and school resources. Too much weight is put on standardized tests and it makes very little sense to care so much about those scores, almost as much as a person's GPA which should be a more honest account of a person's passion and dedication to their work. I wish they were more specific in this article, though, about which students were selected to take these tests and how. It's great to see that they were tested on skills such as reading, math, and writing, but instead flexibility, memory, and processing.
I had the same question as Robert; Is this a sampling of students in the undergraduate programs, graduate programs, or a mixture? While here in the School of Drama the undergrad and grad students are often taking the same classes, and have very similar requirements, it is very different at a lot of other schools and majors, where these programs are a lot more separate from each other, which I would think would effect the results significantly.
As seems to be the theme, everyone has noticed that there isn't a lot of information in this article to lend credibility to the study. One of the major questions I have, as Ariel put very well, is who was studied? I imagine they self selected, to a degree. Also, were they first year students, or people who had already benefited from the education of the school? The reason that rankings based on resources and SAT scores work is that they are measurable across all universities whereas this is much harder to figure out. All that being said, some of the specific areas that this study measures (like problem solving or attention) could be very interesting themselves,but not as an index to which school is overall "better".
Awesome! While of course these statistics articles and rankings really don't mean a whole lot in the real world, it's nice to see that CMU was ranked as one of the smartest colleges in America! It certainly doesn't come as much of a surprise to me, we really do have brilliant people here, and continuously foster new innovation-both in the computer science world, and in the arts as well! (In addition to all of the other areas as well.) It's nice to see we were recognized for these accomplishments.
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