ABSTRACT
Indeed, each NRC rater assesses the “scholarly quality of program faculty” under one of several labels ranging from “distinguished” to “not sufficient”; these words are turned into numbers (!) and then averaged, and this average is the representational rating of the program. The result is a linear order of all the departments in each field. I have come to the conclusion that such linear orders of departments are simply meaningless, and I said so in my article,
“NRC Ratings of Research Doctoral Programs” (Notices of the AMS, Vol. 43, 1996). Despite my attempted eloquent argument, everybody continues to rate departments in linear order, as if mathematicians had never developed the idea of partial order. So much for abstract mathematical ideas.
