About a dozen departments have contacted me so far asking to be considered for inclusion in the new PGR surveys. (The draft faculty lists are here, and see the comments for corrections, many of which have not yet been incorporated.) If any other departments wish to be included, please e-mail me a current faculty list in a form conforming to those on the draft faculty lists. The Advisory Board will begin voting by the middle of next week on which additional programs to include in the survey.
As noted in the earlier posting accompanying the draft faculty lists:
2. All departments that ranked in 2006 are included here (with the exception of Florida, which has suspended its PhD program). Faculties surveyed in 2006 that did not score high enough to rank are not included this year, unless changes in the interim seem likely to alter that result. Several faculties not surveyed recently (or ever before) are included in this round: Nebraska, UC Santa Cruz, Utah.
3. If your faculty is not included, and you would like it to be part of the survey, please send me a faculty list (organized like those in the document, above) and I will submit it to the Advisory Board to vote on inclusion. The criterion for inclusion is that the faculty seems to have a chance to rank in the "top 50" in the US, "the top 15" in the UK, "the top 5" in Australasia, or the "top 5" in Canada. (In 2006, all departments with scores of 2.2 or higher were ranked--the cut-off for 2008 will likely be similar.)
Faculties not included in the overall ranking will still be ranked in the 'specialty' categories, using the 2006 results and/or based on the judgment of Advisory Board members with pertinent expertise.
Faculties considering asking for inclusion should bear in mind that PGR evaluators are, in general, a 'tough' group: even the best departments in the Anglophone world fail to score a 5.0, and many evaluators rank departments "0" (i.e., inadequate for a PhD program) without much hesitation. We certainly want to make sure that the overall rankings do not omit programs that would perform competitively, but there may also be costs for departments in being formally evaluated in this process. Again, even if a department is not included in the overall surveys, we will make every effort to insure fair representation of programs with particular areas of excellence in the specialty rankings.
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