The usefulness of faculty ratings of departments and department heads as a measure of departmental quality is examined. It is found that the performance of the department head plays a very important role in faculty perceptions of the departments, and vice versa. (Author/MLW)

The history of evaluations of academic departments through peer review rankings and subsequent attempts to identify empirical correlates of the ratings are reviewed. Findings indicate that American Council on Education rankings can be predicted by the departmental rate of publication in highly cited journals. (Author/MLW)

Using aggregated data from each of four classical rankings of graduate programs in U.S. universities, it was found that the rankings of institutions in separate studies correlate significantly with each other and the results from the SDR model correlate significantly with the objective measures of academic honors, basic research, and research and…