On A Brighter Note

[friarwolf]

Our average SAT for the incoming class cracked the 1300 mark - 1302. And this is with a larger incoming class so we have that going for us.

Regarding our fall in the US News rankings to #60, it is time to start focusing on where we are lagging nationally. The quality of our faculty......We have much brighter students coming to SMU but we haven't taken the necessary steps to provide them with higher quality education in the classroom.

Turner is too accepting of average performance from his Deans. The Deans must demand higher performance from the professors or we are going to continue slipping in the rankings. The feedback from US News stated as much. They pointed to 2 deficient areas: quality of the professors and feedback from high school guidance counselors.

[StallionsModelT]

friarwolf,

Someone on here said that the US News rankings are using 5 year old data. Given that the vast majority of improvements at SMU have occured within the last 5-10 years, can we expect to jump back up on this list in the coming years? I don't want to see SMU slipping into the 60's.

[gostangs]

its not that it is five years old, it is that it is the TRAILING 5 years. So schools that are stagnant in some areas (UT) still show higher than universities that are improving rapidly (SMU). They obviously don't have this most recent class in the mix. Also 5 yrs ago we had about a sub 1200 SAT and many other areas were deficient, so each year those older bad yrs roll off.

[friarwolf]

I don't think that info is correct. I think there is a lag between current and past performance from a reputation point of view. Let's face it, there are many folks out there that still think SMU is a diploma factory.

Even though the quality of our admits is at an all time high and everyone loves the campus and its location, we are swimming uphill. The quality of our faculty has not kept up with the improvement of our incoming students. A large part of the 2nd century campaign is to generate more endowed professorships to attract a higher quality of professor. However, this falls in line with the current thinking of our leadership - throw money at it. Fine and dandy but what about all the current professors who either can't or won't raise their level of teaching to match the incoming quality of student? The business school is our crown jewel - the average SAT score for a kid at Cox is 1450. Yet our ranking of the business school is stagnant - hell, UT Dallas business school is now ranked above us. Niemi talks a good game and raises money but he needs to be fired because he has done very little to improve the level of teaching.

So, if Turner doesn't stop his acceptance of marginal performance from his deans, we will continue to drift in the rankings. The easy stuff where you can throw money at a problem to fix it is over. The hard part - demanding and getting better performance of the faculty must begin now. Is Turner and our board up for it? Don't know..........

[gostangs]

I don't think we are saying different things. We will rise due to better student quality - but only by as much as we are catching other rising institutions - which is very tough to say the least. I think friar has a good point about professor quality. we have some tenured professors that cant get pushed out fast enough - so that is an issue. I think we have a few very dynamic young deans, but there is plenty of coasting also. Some of the reputational thing is based on math (acceptance rate of the admitted students, percentage of top ten percent, standardized tests) and some of it is based on who the raters see getting recruited to which schools. We need to definitely step up our professor recruiting, which they can do if they get the money.