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Comment by kriro | Hacker News Reader

CMU has dropped significantly in my personal ranking of universities. None of that was related to faculty being hired away. All of it is related to activities like attacking the Tor network or accidentally admitting 800 students. Maybe they have a PR problem but my overal view of them is pretty meh even though they are one of the more elite CS schools (and I think Pittsburgh is a fairly nice city, never been there though).

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I did research in machine learning in college (not at CMU). CMU remains the top overall university in the world for machine learning and robotics (depending on specific subfields of ML/robotics the rankings will switch, but at that fine granularity the difference is just 1-3 professors).

Your metric for ranking universities is in no way based on how productive the university is in research or the quality of the graduating students. Even if you consider the things you mentioned as proxies for the quality of the university, they are extremely weak ones and there are better metrics available to judge the quality of a university.

Am I wrong in viewing this comment as a flawed attempt to attack the university? Open to any counterarguments.

Presumably OP's ranking cares about things besides just research quality in CS or graduating students? Those other things aren't proxies for the quality of the university, they're components of it.

Unfortunately creating one's own idiosyncratic ranking holds no value to the world if it doesn't conform to what the world values. (Open to counter arguments on what the world values)

People generally use rankings to gauge how strong a university is perceived. OP's comments do nothing to change my perception of the university's strength.

Thanks OP for the downvote without any written rebuttal, I'll take that as a confirmation of my above point.

You can't downvote replies to your own comments.

You are correct that the comment is based on a couple of anecdotes that don't say much about the school, so it has little value.

It's a personal judgement that is independent of the actual research performed. It's only a personal ranking to answer the question "would I want to work there".

I also downgrade universities that have a hard pro copyright stance, do heavy military research etc. It's a personal ranking and not one that I'd tell anyone to follow. People should rank by their own criteria.

While the research was unfortunately performed under the CMU name, the SEI was more or less founded by the government to do this type of research and is not related to the rest of the school.

I wrote to the ethics board about it when the story broke, but I doubt anything will be done, as it's more or less a separate institution.

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