Professor Jennings (UC Merced) gets credit for being the only person to not simply grouse about the PGR rankings (although she does plenty of that), but to actually try to offer an alternative resource--kudos to her for that. The job placement data she and her team collect are useful, but she chooses to present some of it in a tendentious and misleading way, as I (and others) have noted before: she treats placement success as landing a tenure-track job your first year out on the market, thus failing to distinguish between getting a postoc (even a fabulous postdoc) and getting nothing. As many have also noted ad nauseam, by now, job placement data is a backward-looking measure: Southern California didn't have very good job placement when the PGR first recorded the department's rise, now it does (which is why PGR rank correlates pretty well with tenure-track placement a few years later). I would urge students to examine the raw data on placement, not the tendentious rating of placement success. (Of course, the reason all departments post placement data is because I "cajoled" them into doing so twenty years ago.)
The "student reputation" data Jennings et al. collect, by contrast, is far more dubious.
Students should be aware that Professor Jennings has a history of producing extremely misleading placement rankings; of trying to use data to attack her enemies; and of not having a good command of statistics (here and here). The recent work, fortunately, looks better, subject to the reservations noted above.
UPDATE: As I observed last year, philosophy Twitter really is the "Fox News of the Wokerati," a kind of inverted reality in which truths are dismissed as lies (a la Trump), and falsehoods are presented as true. Jennings, on Twitter, dismissed the preceding as "lies," even though every single factual point is documented with links, often to her own words. Naturally, she didn't say what precisely the lies were, since there are none. And the usual suspects agreed with her despite the lack of evidence--because, after all, that is how the delusions produced by group polarization work. The fact remains that, given her history, students need a caveat emptor when using data she was involved with.
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