Thursday, Sept. 30, 2004 | 11:15 a.m.
A recent national study from the Princeton Review ranked UNLV as fourth in the nation -- for students who almost never study, that is.
The college exam preparation company also ranked UNLV No. 7 in the nation for professors who make themselves scarce outside of class, No. 12 for having too many teaching assistants teaching upper division courses and No. 13 for the the political apathy of its students.
The rankings, which came out last month in the Princeton Review's 2005 consumer report on "The Best 357 Colleges," are based on surveys students fill out on the company's Web site, princetonreview.com, Erik Olson, the book's senior editor, said.
The book is the only ranking guide that relies on student opinion to rate a campus, Olson said.
"If UNLV is on bad lists it's because their students are rating them poorly compared to how students rate their universities at other campuses," Olson said.
Olson tempered UNLV's negative rankings by pointing out that the Princeton Review had to consider the university to be one of the nation's best colleges to even appear in the book, and that the Princeton Review has included UNLV since the report's inception more than 10 years ago.
UNR, Nevada's original land grant institution that includes the University of Nevada School of Medicine and which is in a higher research category than UNLV, has never made the list, Olson said.
The Princeton Review also named UNLV as one of 134 "best in the west" colleges and distinguished the university as a "best value" school.
But those positive evaluations did not make the other ratings sit any easier with UNLV officials, spokeswoman Hilarie Grey said, and only made them question the validity of the rankings even more.
"We wish we could be proud of the high ratings as we defend and dispute the low ratings, but we can't," Grey said. "We don't tend to take it as a serious measure of what we are doing around UNLV."
Grey said the Princeton Review rankings appear to be more for "entertainment" than as an actual consumer guide. UNLV administrators do not cooperate with the guidebook and do not allow Princeton Review officials to poll students on campus, Grey said.
The UNLV administration's reluctance to participate in the guide does make it harder to collect surveys, Olson said, but enough students fill out the forms online to make the data statistically significant. Students have to have a valid UNLV e-mail address to vote, and may only do so once, Olson said.
About 110,000 students filled out the surveys nationwide, with an average of about 300 per campus, Olson said. He could not say how many students participated from UNLV.
In a definitely unscientific survey of students hanging out in the Moyer Student Union on Monday, they, too, questioned the validity of the Princeton Review rankings and debated whether there was any truth to the guidebook's claims.
Most were insistent that they do study, although only one in six were doing so on Monday. The No. 4 ranking was based on how many hours UNLV students reported they studied compared to other universities, Olson said.
"I think that's bull because I for one have had to study so much for my classes," Krystal Albizo, an 18-year-old sophomore political science major from Mesquite, said. "I wonder who they are interviewing for their statistics. You can make statistics say whatever you want."
Albizo said such generalizations are unfair because "College is what you make of it. You can learn as much here as at Harvard."
Other students said other priorities -- be it work or family duties or just the lure of the nearby Strip -- may pull students away from their books.
"People do study, but probably not as much as we should," Nico Holmes-Gull, an 18-year-old nursing freshman from Las Vegas, said.
His friend, Z Anderson, a 19-year-old freshman pre-med student, said he's "against studying" because he said if you can't pick it up from the lecture and notes, you're not going to learn it by cramming for two hours before the test.
"Just because you don't have to study doesn't mean you are a bad student, you just may already know it," Anderson said.
Students were more forceful in defending their professors -- and heavily disagreed with the Princeton Review ranking that their professors are unavailable outside class or that they have teaching assistants teaching too many of the classes.
"My professors give me their home phone number, cell phone, e-mail, and they are usually available from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m.," 20-year-old junior computer science major Alex Zivanovic, of Serbia, said.
UNLV employs about 270 graduate teaching assistants out of 1,700 total instructors, Grey said, and teaching assistants only teach lower division, entry-level courses.
Most students did agree with the ranking that UNLV students have been apathetic in the past when it comes to politics.
"I think a lot of kids don't really care, but they should -- I do," Nia Huerta, an 18-year-old freshman communication major from Moapa Valley, said.
Political leaders on campus said the low ranking isn't caused by a lack of interest in politics or student apathy but stems from students being too busy with other priorities such as jobs and family duties to get involved with the political organizations on campus.
Interest in voting has surged on the campus during this election, students said, and there have been so many voter registration campaigns going on that Anderson said he changed his route to class to avoid them.
"This election is a huge election," Anderson said. "It might take more for students to get involved but they do get involved."
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