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Monday, January 29, 2007

Video Conferencing Instead of Interviewing

Pea Soup and American Philosophy both suggest doing APA interviewing through video conferencing instead of regular interviewing.

American Philosophy also has a post discussing Leiter's response to the article in New York Times about Rutgers.

3 comments:

Aidan said...

find the suggestion that we get academics in other fields to rank philosophy departments in the Capp piece on Leiter, and the implication that it would show that there was something wrong with the Gourmet Rankings if those other results didn't tally with those published, pretty bizarre. It's probably true that you can't prevent each philosopher from coming to the ranking process with favourites, but presumably that's one reason why so many professional philosophers are consulted. I'm not sure what dismissing the people who seem best placed to judge these matters would gain us.

Brit Brogaard said...

Hi Aidan,
I agree it would be bizarre to substitute a report made by people from outside the field for the PGR. But I agree with John Capps that it would be interesting to see how we are viewed by "outsiders". The primary goal of the PGR is to give guidance to undergrads and M.A. students who are applying for Ph.D. programs. In my opinion, it serves that purpose well. But there is nothing wrong, in principle, with alternative sources of information. Then again. There used to be just one television news channel available to us in Copenhagen. It used to send really great programs (because it didn't have to compete with commercial TV). Now, with the competition, the quality of the programming went down.

Aidan said...

"But there is nothing wrong, in principle, with alternative sources of information."

Oh, absolutely. I took all sorts of other factors and sources of information about schools into account when making my decision about grad school, and I'd strongly recommend anyone else going through that process to do the same. But I'm just not sure what we'd really learn from the kind of survey Capp proposed, and in particular I want to resist the implication that this would be a superior way of proceeding to the Gourmet's current practice (whatever faults it may have).