Determine the inputs of your rating and its methodology. How you choose to rate schools is important and says a great deal about your priorities. The variables you can take into account may include the rate of employment of the college's graduates, their salaries, the number of patents filed by school's faculty, the ratio of students to professors, the number of students enrolled, the number of available programs and tuition fees.
Collect all the necessary data. Most of the data should be available either on colleges' websites or from existing ratings, such as the one compiled by the U.S. News & World Report. If you cannot find the data you are seeking, send an inquiry letter to the engineering college asking for it. If a certain college doesn't have the data you want, use data from previous years and note this fact in the footnote of your rating.
Give each engineering college a score of 1 to 10 for each variable. For example, a school whose engineers earn more than $70,000 per year can rate 10 for the Salaries After Graduation variable, those whose graduates earn from 65,000 to 70,000 can rate 9, and so on. Give each school a score on each variable.
Assign each variable a score of its own, depending on how important it is in your rating. Let the score set be from 1 to 3, with decimals allowed. For example, if you value the salaries of graduates more than the number of patents filed by the faculty members, assign 2.5 to the Salaries After Graduation variable and 1.8 to the Number of Patents Filed variable.
Multiply the score of each variable by the score each school received. For example, if the Massachusetts Institute of Technology got 7 in terms of its graduates' salaries, and the score of the variable is 2.5, then the weighted score is 7 x 2.5= 17.5. MIT has 17.5 on the Salaries After Graduation weighed variable.
Add up the scores and rate the engineering colleges according to the aggregate number of weighted scores. The schools that have the highest scores on the most important variables will come out on top.