The School of Engineering and Applied Sciences earned national recognition last week when a national index ranked four departments within the school among the top ten Engineering programs.
Academic Analytics, a company that sells research on faculty productivity, released these rankings in its third annual Faculty Scholarly Productivity index.
The Electrical Systems Engineering Department was accredited for the first time, ranked third after the Rochester Institute of Technology and University of New Mexico.
"The fact that ESE was ranked among the top is a strong indication of the scholarly activity of the faculty and the quality of the department's program," ESE deputy chairman Jan van der Spiegel said.
"As with each type of ranking system, one has to take it with a grain of salt, but it nevertheless confirms the intellectual vitality of our programs, faculty and students," he added.
The Computer Science Department was also accredited for the first time, and ranked seventh behind schools like California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The Bioengineering and Chemical Engineering departments both fell to seventh place from second and fifth, respectively, last year.
"I don't think we place a lot of emphasis on rankings internally as a school," ESE professor Daniel Lee said, "but it does act as good motivation for students looking to apply to Engineering programs."
But while higher officials might worry about the implications of these rankings, it doesn't look like Engineering students pay too much attention to them.
"I think the rankings are pretty much meaningless," Bioengineering junior Osama Ahmed said. One possibile explanation for the drop in productivity could be "that faculty thought it was more important to concentrate on getting Skirkanich up and running, rather than writing journal articles."
The productivity of each faculty member is judged on as many as five factors: books published, journal publications, citations of journal articles, federal-grant dollars awarded and honors and awards.
Universities use these reports to measure up the performance of their faculty members against other institutions.
Depending on the amount of data they request, institutions pay between $10,000 and $40,000 a year for reports that compare their departments with those of 10 peer institutions of their choice.
