My first gut reaction to the "total" column was that there's no way it made any sense because it seemed very biased towards well-rounded universities (universities that are very competitive across all categories). Then I realized that the sum was equivalent to taking the mean across the 4 categories, so it does make sense.
Perhaps using the mean (rounded to 3 SF or 1 DP) would make more intuitive sense? That also allows users to understand something by looking at only a single university, e.g. "Brown's average rank is 30.3" makes sense by itself, whereas I don't think "Brown's total rank is 121" does.
If you decide to do this, it may make sense to revisit #192. You could write "Average" with a tooltip explaining that you use the geometric mean
My first gut reaction to the "total" column was that there's no way it made any sense because it seemed very biased towards well-rounded universities (universities that are very competitive across all categories). Then I realized that the sum was equivalent to taking the mean across the 4 categories, so it does make sense.
Perhaps using the mean (rounded to 3 SF or 1 DP) would make more intuitive sense? That also allows users to understand something by looking at only a single university, e.g. "Brown's average rank is 30.3" makes sense by itself, whereas I don't think "Brown's total rank is 121" does.
If you decide to do this, it may make sense to revisit #192. You could write "Average" with a tooltip explaining that you use the geometric mean