| BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : OCTOBER 2, 2000 ISSUE | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| COVER STORY
It's a Whole New B-Game Since BUSINESS WEEK began ranking MBA programs 12 years ago, we have worked hard to make our rankings the best they could be. Over the years, we've increased the number of surveys we send out, as well as the number of schools and companies that receive them. We recognize that just as the world evolves, we need to evolve our scoring system to keep up. With that in mind, this year, we have expanded our rankings in several key ways, which we believe gives our survey even more breadth and depth than our previous six biennial rankings. For instance, we've introduced a measure of a school's influence and prominence in the realm of ideas--what we call intellectual capital (page 89). We've given this new intellectual-capital component a 10% weighting in the overall rankings, with the remaining 90% split evenly between students and recruiters. That's not all. We've also crunched the numbers to gauge the difference between men's and women's levels of satisfaction with B-schools. And we have conducted our first-ever ranking of European and Canadian schools. To reflect changes in the economy, we added about 70 companies to our recruiter list, including technology and venture-capital businesses. We've also expanded our survey by an additional 21 schools, for a total of 82, resulting in a ranking of the top 30 schools instead of our usual 25.
We sent our 37-question survey to 16,843 graduates of the Class of 2000 and received 10,039 replies, a superior response rate of 60% (most surveys garner only about a 25% response rate). Instead of asking them to provide a simple yes or no, we challenged students to think a little harder about their responses by asking them to calibrate their answers on a scale of 1 to 10 for most questions. A typical question: ''To what extent did your school weave e-business topics throughout the curriculum?'' To help us analyze the data and ensure that the results were not skewed by overzealous students or administrators eager to influence results, we again called on statisticians David M. Rindskopf and Alan L. Gross, professors of educational psychology at the City University of New York. As in previous years, this year's student survey results account for half of a school's student satisfaction score. The other half comes from the responses of 4,891 graduates in the 1996 poll and 6,020 from the 1998 poll; each of these groups carries a weight of 25%. Spreading the rankings over six years ensures that short-term changes don't unduly influence results. When all this was tallied up, the total student satisfaction survey was given a 45% weighting in the overall ranking. On the employer side, we sent surveys to 419 companies that actively recruit MBAs. Of those, 247, or 59%, responded. Recruiters were asked to rate their top 20 schools according to the quality of students and their company's experience with B-school grads past and present. Each school's total score was then divided by the number of responding companies that recruited MBAs from that school. The recruiter poll also counted for 45% of a school's ranking score. To produce the final ranking, BUSINESS WEEK combined the student, recruiter, and intellectual-capital scores, weighted proportionally. This approach accounts for the statistical significance of one school's lead over another in each poll, and gives more credit to schools that achieve a commanding advantage in one area. Because there tend to be greater differences among schools in the corporate survey, recruiter opinion tends to have a slightly greater weight in the overall ranking. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP |
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 RELATED ITEMS The Best B-Schools Table of Contents The Best B-Schools COVER IMAGE: The Best B-Schools TABLE: How the Report Cards Get Graded It's a Whole New B-Game A Global Report Card Building a World-Class Business School in Japan (int'l edition) INTERACT E-Mail to Business Week Online | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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