Why are the dynamic and official rankings different?
The Dynamic Rankings are intended to provide a starting point for students to find schools that a customized on 1 or 2 factors for them personally. Many users use it, and the dynamic rankings need to be done in real-time. For that reason, they are done with as little computation as possible — meaning that very important calculations such as distribution matching and normalization are left out — to provide a fast approximation. The Official rankings however are a large cross-sectional analyses that perform normalizations, free variable binding, apple-apple distribution matching, and overall require an enormous amount of computation across a number of variables — it really is not feasible in a realtime ranking system like the dynamic ranking. Because there is such a complex mathematical difference between the two, there are bound to be some significant differences. To read in depth about how the OFFICIAL rankings are performed, please go to Rankings Explained. Q6. Schools can’t be compar
