The Official IvyGate College Rankings as Determined By Internet Quizzes

by | September 11, 2009 at 9:00 am

m_5kCollege rankings are generally quite zany, but this year’s lists have taken ridiculousness to a new level. We’ve seen the Princeton Review name Columbia as topping the list of the best college towns–with Barnard coming in third despite being located three yards away. We’ve seen Forbes rank Cornell as the 207th best university in America thanks to a formula that assigns a 25% weight to RateMyProfessors.com. We’ve even seen GQ magazine redefine the Jeremy Piven Hierarchy of Assholery™ by sticking Brown at the top of their “Douchiest Colleges” list.

It’s all made for great amusement (and page views, cha-ching!). However, we here at IvyGate feel we can do one better in terms of ludicrousness, while at the same time create a college ranking equally as reasonable as anything U.S. News can produce. (Ivy League schools only, of course.)

Like Forbes, we’re also going to utilize a website in our ranking methodology. However, we’re going to show up those flat-tax pussies by giving our chosen website 100% of the weight. Also, the website we’ve chosen is one that, like RateMyProfessors, is very popular with college students. The difference between IvyGate’s data source and Forbes’ is that ours is a trusted source of factual information and it is a better teacher than any professor in history–because no professor has encyclopedic knowledge of British monarchs, the periodic table, and Seth Rogen movies. Our chosen source of college ranking data is Sporcle.

For the unenlightened, Sporcle is a magnificent gift bestowed upon us by so that we could avoid doing real work for hours at a time, instead taking little timed quizzes like “Name all the countries in Europe” or “Name all the original 151 Pokémon”. And once you’ve completed each quiz, you can see how your score compare to everyone who has taken the quiz and how you’re an idiot for forgetting that Family Ties took place in Columbus. The collection of quiz topics is so incredibly extensive that there are three full quizzes devoted to the Ivy League. There’s one just for naming the eight schools, one for naming the schools and their mascots, and one for naming the locations of the colleges. And no, Sporcle does not accept “deep financial shit” as an answer for Harvard’s location.

So in order to determine the rankings, we’re simply going to average up the percentage of times each school or school’s location was correctly identified by test takers in the three quizzes. No school was identified 100% of the time, as these quizzes must have been taken at least a few times by Californians. This is a good rating system because the more a school was correctly identified in a quiz, the more well-known it must be. And isn’t the entire reason we attended Ivy League schools is so that others know we attended Ivy League schools? Anyway, here are the final results:

  1. Harvard (Ranking: 83.4)
  2. Princeton (79.4)
  3. Yale (78.6)
  4. Brown (73.6)
  5. Columbia (68.4)
  6. Cornell (67.6)
  7. Pennsylvania (67.5)
  8. Dartmouth (53.25)

There you go. While it appears that Brown got a nice Hermione Bump and Dartmouth was held back because nobody knows where the hell it is, overall the list looks pretty good. And we didn’t even need sophisticated computer programs or access to private databases. Our next step is to publish this list in a magazine, fill it out by throwing in some old posts about i-banking, and let the frenetic high school parent cash roll in. Sure, you may say that the IvyGate college rankings aren’t scientific in the slightest, but that’s the beauty of college rankings. The science involved is what you create it to be.

 
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  • Columbia 2011 @ Columbia63

    Location: % guessed right

    Columbia – 89.2%
    Penn – 73.8%
    Princeton – 72.3%

    Because Kansas City is in Missouri and Trix are for kids.

  • Columbia 2011 @ Columbia63

    Location: % guessed right

    Columbia – 89.2%
    Penn – 73.8%
    Princeton – 72.3%

    Because Kansas City is in Missouri and Trix are for kids.

  • lolwut

    People actually don’t know where Penn is?

  • lolwut

    People actually don’t know where Penn is?

  • @ lulwut

    State College, right?

    In high school, at a typical, suburban, midwestern public high school, I had no idea what UPenn was. I had some sense that it was prestigious and “better” than Penn State, in the same sense that Michigan was “better” than Michigan State, but not much more than that. I think even that sense was from an acreted impression of prestige and hierarchy from reading a bit of collegeconfidential. I definitely did not encounter it in the pop-cultural medium as a kid, like I had with, say, Princeton, Stanford, Harvard, or the Columbia Journalism School.

    That said, once I got to college and onto the east coast, and was better-immersed in academia, did the strength and relevance of Penn start to pop up again and again. But as a layman in middle America? Not really.

    (This sort of “middle American recognition” factor is, I think, what people are usually squabbling and pissing themselves over)

  • http://Derpadoo @ lulwut

    State College, right?

    In high school, at a typical, suburban, midwestern public high school, I had no idea what UPenn was. I had some sense that it was prestigious and “better” than Penn State, in the same sense that Michigan was “better” than Michigan State, but not much more than that. I think even that sense was from an acreted impression of prestige and hierarchy from reading a bit of collegeconfidential. I definitely did not encounter it in the pop-cultural medium as a kid, like I had with, say, Princeton, Stanford, Harvard, or the Columbia Journalism School.

    That said, once I got to college and onto the east coast, and was better-immersed in academia, did the strength and relevance of Penn start to pop up again and again. But as a layman in middle America? Not really.

    (This sort of “middle American recognition” factor is, I think, what people are usually squabbling and pissing themselves over)

  • Oops

    *accreted

  • http://Derpadoo Oops

    *accreted

  • P’09

    I’m curious about the answering mechanism for this survey. Was it by state, or city/town, or what? I imagine a lot of people could guess something like “Boston,” “Connecticut,” or “New Jersey” for Harvard, Yale, and Princeton respectively, but it seems to me that very few would correctly guess “Cambridge,” “New Haven,” and “Princeton.” However, if the former were accepted as correct answers (which I suspect they were), than how would Penn not be first on the list? Almost anyone could determine that the University of Pennsylvania is in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Seems a little weird.

  • P’09

    I’m curious about the answering mechanism for this survey. Was it by state, or city/town, or what? I imagine a lot of people could guess something like “Boston,” “Connecticut,” or “New Jersey” for Harvard, Yale, and Princeton respectively, but it seems to me that very few would correctly guess “Cambridge,” “New Haven,” and “Princeton.” However, if the former were accepted as correct answers (which I suspect they were), than how would Penn not be first on the list? Almost anyone could determine that the University of Pennsylvania is in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Seems a little weird.

  • Penn ’12

    ^It’s by city. Cambridge, New Haven, Princeton, Philadelphia, Providence, Ithaca, New York, Hanover.

  • Penn ’12

    ^It’s by city. Cambridge, New Haven, Princeton, Philadelphia, Providence, Ithaca, New York, Hanover.

  • Jewniversity of Pennsylasia

    Who cares? After NSO you are telling me that this is the most interesting thing that Ivygate has to report?

  • Jewniversity of Pennsylasia

    Who cares? After NSO you are telling me that this is the most interesting thing that Ivygate has to report?

  • Sam

    Could it be that Princeton got a bump since it is located in ‘Princeton’?

  • Sam

    Could it be that Princeton got a bump since it is located in ‘Princeton’?

  • sasha

    The fact that Penn isn’t first, even if the damn thing was by city, makes this whole ranking retarded and moot as shit (as if no one thought otherwise).

  • sasha

    The fact that Penn isn’t first, even if the damn thing was by city, makes this whole ranking retarded and moot as shit (as if no one thought otherwise).

  • Jennifer

    Fuckin ingenious. Humorous posts and bizarre ideas are
    what I love abt ivygate

  • Jennifer

    Fuckin ingenious. Humorous posts and bizarre ideas are
    what I love abt ivygate

  • P’09.5

    Surely, of all of them, Princeton should have come in first as it is the only one that shares the name of the town it is in.

  • P’09.5

    Surely, of all of them, Princeton should have come in first as it is the only one that shares the name of the town it is in.

  • http://www.centralpolitics.com/category/general/ Britt Balasa

    This is very attention-grabbing, heard something about this on Fox… Thanks so much for elaborating.