csopenrankings: display mean instead of sum

[zaz]

My first gut reaction to the "total" column was that there's no way it made any sense because it seemed very biased towards well-rounded universities (universities that are very competitive across all categories). Then I realized that the sum was equivalent to taking the mean across the 4 categories, so it does make sense.

Perhaps using the mean (rounded to 3 SF or 1 DP) would make more intuitive sense? That also allows users to understand something by looking at only a single university, e.g. "Brown's average rank is 30.3" makes sense by itself, whereas I don't think "Brown's total rank is 121" does.

If you decide to do this, it may make sense to revisit #192. You could write "Average" with a tooltip explaining that you use the geometric mean

[swallace21]

Hey Zaz, thanks for the suggestion. The total column is adding up the displayed ranking sources. By default, it does emphasize the more well rounded universities. But the user can easily change this by toggling ranking sources. We can make the existing tooltip a bit more informative.

We generally like to keep the numbers (rankings) with a consistent number of decimal points. It might be more intuitive for a the average user to sum 4 numbers rather than average them.

[zaz]

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly!

Maybe I just have an unusual perspective on this. I could see how the total column was calculated, but I did not understand what it meant at first; I wasn't even immediately sure that lower numbers were better. It only made sense to me once I realized that it was 4 times the average ranking.

I'm sure people can sum numbers in their head more easily than average them, but I'm not sure why that matters. You have some fairly complicated calculations going on with PageRank and the other rankings, I'm not sure what the benefit of an extremely simple last step is.

In any case, thank you for your great work on this! Placement rank is particularly cool. Feel free to close this if you disagree.

[swallace21]

I'm sure people can sum numbers in their head more easily than average them, but I'm not sure why that matters.

Our initial ideas for the decision are for simplicity and usability.

I am happy to keep the issue open for a bit if others in the community prefer a different option or want to comment. If there is a big enough push, then we will be open to changing it.

You might find this extra page we have about Placement Rank using the PageRank algorithm interesting: https://drafty.cs.brown.edu/csopenrankings/placement-rank.html

Again thanks for your interest in the project/research. It is great to feedback from the community. :)