The influential and contentious U.S. News and World Report college rankings are getting a makeover, with ambivalent reactions from students and University officials.

According to an announcement made last week, the magazine plans to collect information from high school guidance counselors in a bid to make its ratings more qualitative.

According to its Web site, the magazine makes many changes in its methodology from year to year that change the relative standing of schools. In addition to the changes already described, this year the rankings will also take into account changes in the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching’s classification system, which forms the core of the rankings.

According to Senior Assistant to the President Jeff Wachtel, the ranking system may be helpful as a guide, but should not be the only source of information guiding students’ application decisions.

“Although the methodology for the rankings is not scientific, we believe it is beneficial for students and parents to have a range of information available to them,” Wachtel said.

Wachtel added that the University would likely continue to participate in the revised rankings system with the changes, although it was unclear whether the changes would improve the accuracy of the ratings.

“It is difficult to rank universities on one scale,” said Wachtel. “Without knowing more about the methodology, we cannot asses this.”

Students seemed apathetic about the changes because they did not feel that the rankings system was relevant to their college admission decision.

According to Kiran Agarwal-Harding ‘09, the primary factors behind his decision to apply to Stanford were the quality of the medical school, distance from home and weather. Additionally, he said that the rankings were not particularly useful to people applying to institutions not structured like Stanford.

“My sister plans on going to a liberal arts college, so the U.S. News ranking system wasn’t very helpful,” Agarwal-Harding said.

Ashwin Mudaliar ‘09 was more critical of the ratings system.

“I think it’s a very arbitrary ranking system,” said Mudaliar. “Like for example, the reputation index — how do you measure reputation on a scale of one to five?”

Mudaliar said that he understood the intent behind the rankings, but said that it was difficult to assess many of the factors that were used to create the rankings. In particular, he said that the quality of professors is almost impossible to ascertain because the rankings do not take into account important details like teaching style.

Many students were simply unaware of the methodology and were skeptical of the changes made.

“I’ve never heard anyone explain exactly how they do their rankings,” said Garrett Hayes ‘09. “And frankly I don’t think that most people at Stanford care because it doesn’t matter to them; they know their school is good.”