20/20: ME Department Maintains High Rankings

Once again, the Clark School’s Department of Mechanical Engineering has maintained its high rankings in the 2010 edition of “America’s Best Colleges” and “America’s Best Graduate Schools” published by U.S. News & World Report. Both the ME undergraduate and ME graduate programs have been ranked as 20th in the nation among similar programs.

According to the U.S. News methodology, the “America’s Best Colleges” engineering school ratings are, “based solely on the peer judgments of deans and senior faculty who rated each program they are familiar with on a scale from 1 (marginal) to 5 (distinguished).” Rankings are also given for each specialty engineering program a college offers.

The “America’s Best Graduate Schools” engineering ratings are determined from a more complex ranking system. Each engineering school is graded based on 10 indicators, each with a separate weight. Of the ten indicators, the Quality Assessment and Peer Assessment Score have the highest weights, at .40 and .25, respectively. As with the undergraduate engineering rankings, the graduate engineering schools rank specialty engineering programs as well.

The significance of the undergraduate and graduate rankings is due to the academic peer review survey, which is distributed to several academics per engineering program months in advance. This ensures that the rankings are unbiased and representative of the academic community at large. Consequently, the U.S. News engineering rankings provide an objective measure of the unique strengths of the nation's leading engineering programs.

In addition to the ME department’s high rankings, the Clark School has many other top 20 programs in the 2010 survey. Those with top 20 rankings in both undergraduate and graduate programs include: Aerospace Engineering, Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering.

Published September 3, 2009