The new category in the PGR specialty rankings: "Additional programs not evaluated this year but recommended for consideration by the Advisory Board"

MOVING TO FRONT FROM DECEMBER 6--UPDATED

A couple of readers asked about this.  In the past, the Advisory Board would add departments not part of that year's evaluation exercise to the specialty rankings, either based on results from prior years or based on the judgment of experts on the Board (and sometimes based on suggestions by evaluators).  This would entail a good deal of discussion about which grouping into which to place the programs.  This year, some members of the Advisory Board expressed doubts about that practice, and given the severe time pressures we were under to get the content to Wiley-Blackwell in time for it to be available to students (next week!), we decided to simply add a list of recomomended programs that should be considered comparable to those ranked.

UPDATE:  It is important to emphasize that the new listing does not mean the programs so listed are mere "honorable mentions."  All the programs so listed were judged by experts on the Advisory Board to be competitive with the ranked programs; the only difference is that these faculties were not included in the survey.  Any faculty included in the survey was not eligible for such a listing; here we used the scores awarded by the evaluators.  (You can see a list of the faculties evaluated this year here.)