U. S. News Epic Fail

When a private corporation gives out inaccurate information, its’ business generally suffers one way or the other. When a university does it, the school may drop a place in the U. S. News rankings.

“There are no big surprises in this year’s U.S. News & World Report college rankings, out today, and that’s good news for Emory University and Claremont McKenna College,” Mary Beth Marklein reported in USA Today. “Both schools this year acknowledged having provided falsified information to the magazine and to other sources for years.”

“Yet neither saw a significant change when corrected numbers were used for this year’s rankings. Atlanta’s Emory remains in the No. 20 position among national universities, while Claremont McKenna College, of Claremont, Calif., fell from No. 9 to No. 10 among national liberal arts schools.”

What until you hear what they did. “In April, outside investigators for Claremont McKenna said a former dean of admissions acting alone, began inflating SAT scores because he ‘could not bring himself to tell the President’ in 2005 that median SAT scores had dropped,” Marklein reported. “A three-month independent investigation at Emory found that “leadership” in the admission and institutional research offices had been ‘aware of and participated in the misreporting’ of median test scores since at least 2000, and that those responsible no longer worked at Emory.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

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