Stanford University fared well in U.S. News & World Report’s 2006 edition of the annual “America’s Best Graduate Schools” published April 4. The University’s business, education, engineering and medical schools all ranked within the top 10. Moreover, the University’s biological sciences, economics, political science and psychology departments all placed in the top three nationwide.

The magazine surveyed 1,300 academic programs and 9,600 faculty members and professionals. The different types of graduate schools were evaluated according to different rating systems.

The rankings for the business, education, engineering, law and medical schools are based on two types of data — “expert opinion about program quality and statistical indicators that measure the quality of a school’s faculty, research and students.”

University President John Hennessy, however, said he was skeptical about the merits and accuracy of the rating system.

“The way in which the ratings are done probably distorts some things due to their metrics and scales,” Hennessy said in an interview with The Daily.

Philip Pizzo, dean of the School of Medicine, has always felt similarly dissatisfied with the accuracy of the U.S. News rankings.

“The methodology employed by popular magazines, including U.S. News, is highly variegated and imperfect,” he said in an interview with The Daily. “Indeed, the methods employed to rank schools is frequently based on ‘reputation scores’ which can, of course, be subjective.”

In particular, Pizzo found flaw in the magazine’s measure for funding received from the National Institute of Health, or NIH. After making multiple visits to U.S. News and World Report over the course of three years, he convinced the publication to include funding per medical school faculty member, rather than the overall NIH funding for the school.

“Even though the editors [now publish] the data showing funding per faculty member, the current methodology is still unduly biased by size of faculty rather than the quality of the faculty,” he said.

This year’s edition of the magazine also offered additional insight into the rivalry between Stanford and UC Berkeley. While Stanford’s business, education, engineering, and law schools came out on top, Cal’s schools in the humanities performed better.

Rankings aside, Hennessy suggested that both schools offer excellent programs.

“Cal would give us a run for the money in history, English, anthropology, economics and political science, but not psyche” he said.

Regardless, he conceded that both schools were closely matched in their academics.

But some agree that Berkeley’s high rankings in the humanities and Stanford’s dominance in the technical sciences seems to have an element of truth.

Marcus Folch, a fifth-year doctoral candidate in classics said, “I have often heard humanities grad students lament that Stanford — which some refer to as StanTech — cares more about the sciences, and that the University does not do as much to cultivate a vibrant intellectual culture in the humanities as it does for the science and business-related fields.”

Folch said that Berkeley seems to have a much different approach to developing their humanities departments.

“UC Berkeley has made a sustained, concerted effort to develop a superior school of humanities,” he said. “Culturally and intellectually, at Berkeley ideas matter in a way that they do not at most other places.”

However, there may be less of a gap between Stanford and Berkeley than a cursory glance at the rankings might suggest. Berkeley outranked Stanford in English and history by a 0.1 difference on a 5.0 scale. Some believe that the distinction is even smaller than that.

“You can’t really see how close things are and that’s very unfortunate,” Hennessy said. “You give this impression of an absolute ranking which is just silly.”

Business and master’s student Roger Stanley agreed.

“I look at the rankings of the schools at the very top in the way I look at medalists in the Olympics,” he said. “Is the gold medalist in an event ‘better’ than the silver or bronze medalists when they were separated by only thousandths of a second?”

Stanley also pointed out that the ratings do not take into account the needs of individual students.

“Each person needs to look at the methodology of the rankings to make sure he or she agrees with the weighting of criteria,” Staneley said. “If he or she agrees completely with everything, perhaps the ranking is then accurate, but only for him or her. ?We just have to keep in mind that while the data is indisputably quantitative, the method used to produce the ranking is most certainly subjective,” Stanley said.