I’ve always been hesitant to rank schools and programs because numbers don’t tell everything and rankings are very subjective. What’s important to one family may not be important to another. That being said, I believe there is great value in generating a list - as long as you understand the methodology of how that list was created and ordered. I think this spreadsheet can be of great use in placing schools and programs in the right ballpark. It will then be up you, the individual, to determine what will be the best fit.
There are 2 basic methodologies used in the rankings. The first is a combination of NYC-SIFT’s Academic and Survey scores. This would be a “typical” ranking in the sense that it considers traditional academic metrics and overall survey scores. The second emphasizes school environment and academic improvement outcomes. It does this by heavily weighting survey scores and the DOE’s Impact score. The Impact score tries to assess a school’s effectiveness at helping students improve and exceed expected outcomes. This means that it takes into account backgrounds and achievement levels of incoming students. A higher score would indicate an effective teaching and learning environment. I’ve named this method as a school’s “GEM” rating. Two variations of this GEM ranking system include programs that have less than 5 applicants per seat and programs that have less than 3 applicants per seat. I am calling these two variations “Hidden GEMs” and “Super-Hidden GEMs”.
The DOE will release new metrics in December so there will be an updated version of this document at that time. The current document uses the most current survey results (2025-26) but every other metric is from last year’s December data (2024-25).
I hope some of you find this useful for the upcoming admissions cycle!
This document can be found under “Guide”→”Data & Reports”→”Data Downloads” or can be accessed directly here: https://nycsift.com/downloads/NYC-SIFT_ScoresRankings_8-12-2026.xlsx