…now on-line.  Past experience suggests there will be various typos and other errors (e.g., broken links) discovered during the week; please e-mail me if you spot one.  (Please include in your e-mail the URL of the page where the error occurs.)  My thanks again to the members of the Advisory Board and the close to 300 philosophers who participated in the surveys. 

UPDATE:  Please note that in the specialty rankings schools are ranked into groups based on their mean score rounded to the nearest .5 (that appears next to the "Group 2," "Group 3" etc.).  The numbers next to the name of the schools in that group are the median and the mode, not the mean score.  Perhaps it would be helpful to quote this material from the introduction to the specialty rankings to clarify their interpretation:

Next to each grouping, you will find the rounded mean for that group; next to the name of each program within that group you will find the median score for that faculty in parentheses, and then the mode score:  where the mode and median are higher or lower than the mean, it is probably safe to assume that there was some notable divergence of opinion among evaluators.  (Where there was more than one mode, only the average of the two is listed, to simplify the presentation.)  Within a grouping, programs are listed alphabetically.  Only programs with a rounded mean of “3” (meaning “Good”) or higher are so grouped.   (In order to increase the pool of faculties a student should consider, any school with a mean of 2.5 or higher and either a median or mode of 3 was also rounded up to “3” and listed.) 

The Advisory Board has added to the specialty rankings two categories of programs.  Faculties ranked in 2004 or 2006, but not included in the 2008 survey, are marked with an #.  Faculties not rated in 2004 or 2006, but deemed by the Board strong in an area, are marked with an *. 

The purpose of the specialty rankings is to identify programs in particular fields that a student should investigate for himself or herself.  Because of the relatively small number of raters in each specialization, students are urged not to assign much weight at all to small differences (e.g., being in Group 2 versus Group 3).   More evaluators in the pool might well have resulted in changes of .5 in rounded mean in either direction; this is especially likely where the median score is either above or below the norm for the grouping.  Also bear in mind that (1) programs with more faculty specializing in an area tended to be rated more highly than those with just one philosopher in the field; and (2) programs with specialists on the regular full-time faculty rather than “cognates” or part-time faculty tend to be rated more highly in the field.