A philosopher wrote, regarding the earlier poll and the various smear jobs on me:
Something very odd is happening with your poll. It appears that someone is monkeying with the system somehow and upping the number of No votes. Every time I check it, states that formerly were listed as voting Yes overall are switched to 100% No.
I suspect the motivation for this is to make the upcoming publication of your valuable Report seem to be a minority project when it is anything but that.
I hope that you will not allow the compromised poll to tarnish the reputation of the 2014 PGR, and that you do not allow your very useful survey to have its credibility ruined by these antagonists. They are already becoming quite a nuisance without this.
And a grad student wrote:
I am currently a PhD student in a ranked program in Australasia. I'm worried that the online smear campaigns against you and the PGR, along with the poll you just posted, aren't going to accurately reflect the real value of PGR.
I completed my BA in philosophy at a tiny private school. The PGR was an incredibly useful resource when it came to applying to graduate studies. If anything, it exposed me to a lot of programs I probably would not have known about (or I would have needed to spend much more time researching programs). Your critics don't seem to give philosophy students enough credit: Students don't take everything you post on Leiter Reports as God's truth. And we don't take the PGR as an authoritative ranking of programs in every possible way. We're smart enough to realise that there are other methods of ranking and subtle nuances the PGR might not account for. But none of this changes the fact that, on the whole, the PGR constitutes an invaluable resource for students considering graduate school (especially for those coming from smaller isolated schools).
I could elaborate further but I won't take up anymore of your time. Whether or not you continue with the PGR, you should know that many students have found (and will find it if you continue) quite helpful. It's troubling that the campaigns to end the PGR seem to be largely from professors, and not from the students it's discontinuation would negatively impact the most.
So here's a different poll service, which in the past has done better at blocking strategic voting. Here it is. Rank "Yes" #1 if you want the 2014 PGR to go forward; rank "No" #1 if you do not want it to go forward. We'll see how the two come out.
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