The latest edition of Yahoo Internet Life magazine ranked Dartmouth the nation's most "wired" college in the Internet corporation's second annual survey of "America's 100 Most Wired Colleges," an improvement from last year's fifth-place showing.
The College pulled ahead of its nearest contenders, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, partly because of the dual prongs of campus-wide hardwiring and the BlitzMail system, according to a Yahoo Internet Life article.
Other factors boosting the College's ranking include its recently adopted online registration and course work programs, according to the article.
"That a liberal-arts college contends with tech-oriented institutions makes Dartmouth's commitment all the more impressive," wrote Yahoo columnist Don Greenman.
The Internet giant, which began ranking colleges last year, admitted that its rankings have been challenged by many institutions. Disagreement over criteria used in the ratings lay at the root of much of the controversy.
Associate Director for Consulting at computing services Randy Spydell called the survey "non-scientific" in a Dartmouth article last year.
The criteria has, however, been revised since then.
"This year, the questions were different and the rating scheme was different. For example, the survey this year weighted responses from liberal arts schools more heavily because they wanted to acknowledge the more significant commitment liberal arts schools make as opposed to a technical school because you would expect that they would be wired," computing services spokesman Bill Brawley said.
Factors this year focused on campus network, web and e-mail accessibility, the percentage of students with homepages, tolerance of online gaming networks, presence of campus computer labs and presence of online student newspapers and newsgroups.
Despite these changes, some are still skeptical about the validity of Yahoo's rankings.
"It's fun to be number one, but I'm not sure it's relative to anything," Director of Computing Technical Services Punch Taylor said. "I think they changed the way they weighted things. I don't think we're doing things vastly differently this year."
Yahoo Internet Life collaborated with Peterson's, the respected college guidebook publisher, in this year's study.
Other top-ranked colleges include the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana as the top state school and Emerson College as the top small liberal-arts college.
