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Five colleges have recently been caught cooking their admissions statistics in order to secure higher spots in the U.S. News college rankings, that bible of the overachieving high schooler. As admissions officers come clean about the rankings racket, suspicions about U.S. News' credibility have been raised.
A new report from The Washington Post's Nick Anderson explores the increasingly common problem, in which universities submit inflated standardized test scores and class rankings for members of their incoming classes to U.S. News, which doesn't independently verify the information. Tulane University, Bucknell University, Claremont McKenna College, Emory University, and George Washington University have all been implicated in the past year alone. And those are just the schools that got caught:
A survey of 576 college admissions officers conducted by Gallup last summer for the online news outlet Inside Higher Ed found that 91 percent believe other colleges had falsely reported standardized test scores and other admissions data. A few said their own college had done so.
For such a trusted report, the U.S. News rankings don't have many safeguards ensuring that their data is accurate. Schools self-report these statistics on the honor system, essentially. U.S. News editor Brian Kelly told Inside Higher Ed's Scott Jaschik, "The integrity of data is important to everybody ... I find it incredible to contemplate that institutions based on ethical behavior would be doing this." But plenty of institutions are doing this, as we noted back in November 2012 when GWU was unranked after being caught submitting juiced stats.