Inside Higher Ed, AI Med School Rankings Tool Offers Alternative to Traditional Metrics:

As the backlash against traditional college rankings continues to gain momentum, one physician has used artificial intelligence to create an alternative ranking system for prospective medical students.

Instead of relying on U.S. News and World Report’s widely recognized rankings, which consider factors such as medical schools’ research profiles, acceptance rates and the grades and test scores of their students, the new AI-powered ranking tool allows aspiring doctors to include—and choose the weight assigned to—numerous additional factors, such as diversity of students and cost of attendance.

“I don’t necessarily think the U.S. News rankings are bad. The issue is that they reflect the specific vision of one group and one organization,” said Dr. Brandon Turner, a radiation oncology resident at Mass General Brigham in Boston who designed the alternative rankings tool. “I want to make it transparent what is actually being measured and for people to have the capacity to adjust for things they care about.”

Dr. Turner’s idea for his rankings system, which he described in a paper published in JAMA Network Open in July, has been in the works since he was in medical school. But he started questioning the value of traditional rankings even earlier, when he took a course on the sociology of education as an undergraduate at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. …

[A] swelling tide of criticism of U.S. News’s metrics for ranking law and medical schools in recent years pushed him to revisit—and finish—the idea. In addition to Stanford, medical schools at Cornell, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania were among those that dropped out of the rankings earlier this year. Several law schools, including those at Harvard and Yale Universities, also no longer participate in the rankings.

Dr. Turner, who is completing his residency through Harvard, knew this was his moment.

“People are ready and willing to think differently about rankings. I could provide some guidance on how that could look” he said. “Once that happened, I did a lot of sleepless nights and grinded it out.”