Surveys are only as good as their methodology, so we thought you should see all the work that went into developing this presidential ranking. We started off by developing a list of more than 130 scholars, out of which 78 responded. To keep the rankings balanced politically we picked scholars from both liberal and conservative ideological camps and asked them to rate each president on a one to five point scale. The results were much more interesting than a mere ranking of each president. We learned things like, the length of time in office can have a big impact on how history perceives a president, but how old a president is when he is sworn in has almost no impact. We also thought about things like, how the presidents who served before parties chose candidates in nominating conventions are perceived today.