Here's the complete misinformation Penn State's Philosophy Department has put on its homepage:
Penn State’s philosophy department has been highly ranked by the National Research Council (NRC) in its long-awaited national review of PhD granting universities. Out of 90 PhD granting philosophy departments in the United States, Penn State is ranked #11 in terms of overall quality (top 12%) using survey-based weights that evaluated departments’ faculty, students, and program as a whole.
Put aside the irony that the NRC report covered a period when Penn State's PhD program was actually closed down because of a mass exodus of faculty and other controversies, and thus the NRC was "evaluating" a different department than the one that exists now, the simple fact remains that the NRC did not rank Penn State #11--Penn State's R-Ranking (see the earlier discussion) was somewhere between 23rd and 59th. Penn State appears to have simply concocted its own even odder weighting of a selection of the underlying data, and is now passing that off as a qualitative evaluation. Amazing.
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