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Off topic, but the fact that three schools are tied for #2 and three more tied for #6 in these grad school rankings (and FIVE tied for #11) strikes me as a hilarious commentary on the arbitrariness of these rankings. Like, if you weren't fudging the numbers some, but were trying to come up with real scores, you'd have that many exact ties?

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I think the author did the right thing here: pick an arbitrary cutoff like top 20, and assume that within that bucket they’re all pretty good, without worrying too much about the specific ranking of each school.

This is fine. Ties just mean that the scoring has fairly low resolution. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. Heck, "close enough to call them tied" may be a better representation of reality than trying to separate them by a third or fourth decimal digit.

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