HMS Director of Public Affairs Donald L. Gibbons agreed that while the rankings are widely read they should not be considered infallible.

"We hope people here understand there are flaws in any type of ranking of institutions and that there are a lot of good medical schools out there," Gibbons said.

James E. Aisner '68, associate director of communications at HBS, echoed these concerns in a statement released Friday.

Declining to comment on any specific details of the school's short fall in the rankings, he said, "We're interested in information that helps us evaluate how we're being perceived by our various constituents, and these kinds of surveys are part of that mix."

Aisner said he hoped that prospective students would look beyond the rankings to factors such as teaching methods and curriculum.

Several Harvard graduate students said they did exactly that.

"The rankings played a bit of a role," said first-year law student Bruce W. Hickey, "But you take these things with a grain of salt. They're trying to make distinctions that you can't capture numerically in terms of overall assessments of an institution."