astroshrum, you're saying exactly what triggered me to think of this concept. No one has attended every university on Ontario, so how can you rate them on things like quality of education? There could be other factors biasing the current measures. I decided that university rankings seem to be arbitrary, and so I treat them as an arbitrary list made by some person with certain biases.

^ Actually, even for graduate school and a lot of professional schools (particularly the medical ones), the school's reputation or supposed quality doesn't really matter. As far as grad school goes, your supervisor's reputation is more important than your school's reputation, though the two are correlated. Medical professional schools are highly regulated by associated government-sponsored bodies, so they are all very similar in quality.

Because as much as I learn from my profs, I also learn from my colleagues and other students. Being surrounded by retards obviously isn't as conducive to learning.

I get the idea, but do you actually learn from your student peers? I spent six years in university, most of the time in classes with high-achievers. I can't think of a time when I truly learned important stuff from one of my peers. Most of the time I find people only speak up in class to more or less clarify some matter. Some of the time a student will try to correct the prof, usually to no avail (I've only seen it done once, not including the times when the prof just made a mistake). I find my peers waste my time a lot more than they add to my learning.

I can see why MBA students can learn a lot from their peers, as it is a requirement for most B schools that MBA students have at least a few years related work experience; aside from that, I just can't imagine fellow students actually contributing to the learning process. Just sounds like a rationalization for attending a highly competitive school.

There was a group of guys in my program at Western who I called the Inquisition because they loved to just slaughter our profs with questions. They didn't ask stupid questions per se; they tried to ask tough questions that would stump the prof, though they were rarely ever successful in doing so. They would almost orgasm in synchrony when the prof would say something along the lines of "that's a good question." Seriously, I once saw them congratulating one of their "members" for asking what the prof considered a good question. They probably didn't think so, but they were wasting everyone in the class's time.

I don't think I would have done nearly as well as I did without the help of my peers. So yes, I would say I probably did learn a lot from them. I certainly wouldn't have been able to finish all my assignments without their help.

That being said, in response to Xiaohaha's idea that there are 'retards' at certain universities and not at others, I will say there are stupid people everywhere. Yes, even at U of T.

I think it's pretty interesting that in my close friend group, almost everyone is majoring in something different than everyone else. Off the top of my head, here is the list of all of our majors:

- History of Science & Medicine (me)
- Environmental Studies
- Environmental Studies/Economics
- Political Science/Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry
- Anthropology
- Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology/Spanish
- Psychology
- History of Art/Psychology
- Music
- Ethics, Politics & Economics

There's not a lot of overlap between the classes I'm taking and the classes they're taking. I have at least a couple of friends in each of my classes to study with, but anything that I learn from my close friends is usually over dinner or in casual social interactions and not in the classroom.

^ I would say I even solidified my learning by explaining concepts to the 'dumber' people.