The Daily Beast Ranks UCF as Least Rigorous School

Beyond UCF, Campus Beat, Culture, Economy, News — By Jake Rakoci on August 8, 2012 at 1:41 pm

According to The Daily Beast and Newsweek, the University of Central Florida is the least rigorous school in the nation.

The Daily Beast, along with Newsweek has put out multiple college rankings, including most beautiful campuses, best party schools, and most rigorous schools. The credibility of these rankings is questionable, in particular, The Daily Beast ranks Top Party Schools based off of campuses with the most drug/alcohol arrests.

On their website, The Daily Beast explains how they ranked colleges as least rigorous.

“To assess the rigor of the curriculum at some of the nation’s top colleges, we first whittled an initial list of nearly 2,000 accredited 4-year colleges and found the top 200 most selective according to the percentage of applicants admitted and the median SAT/ACT score for accepted students. The most selective schools were then ranked using data from College Prowler on student assessment of workload manageability (out of 10 points) and the student-to-faculty ratio according to the National Center for Education Statistics. (Smaller class size and greater professor oversight are proxies for tougher classes). For the final ranking, the degree of selectivity, workload score, and faculty ratio were each weighted a third.”

Oddly, almost all of Florida’s major public universities were also included in on the list of least rigorous colleges. Florida State University was right behind UCF as number 2 least rigorous, and USF was ranked 4th. Florida Atlantic University was ranked 14th and even the University of Florida cracked the top 25, as they were ranked 21st. Florida and California each had 5 schools represent them in the rankings.

It is interesting to note, that just a month and a half ago UCF discovered a planet named UCF-1.01, led by UCF researcher Kevin Stevenson. Also more recently, Soroush Shabahang a UCF graduate student, made a discovery in the mass production of nanoparticles that could change the way pharmaceuticals are produced and delivered.