<p>UCSD= 100%</p>
<p>Cornell = 80 %</p>
<p>Can we say “gaming the US NEWS SYSTEM” everybody?</p>
<p>tom,
If your point is that the metric of using Top 10% students as a meaningful metric for ranking colleges is a BAD idea, then I would most heartily agree. As it relates to this example, however, I’m not so sure that there is gaming going on. I can see how a school like UCSD, with 97% IS enrollment and about 5000 entering students each fall, could easily fill its class with Top 10% scorers. California has a population of 38 million. Meanwhile, Cornell is known to have a holistic admissions process and class rank is not a particularly strong factor among the various criteria that they weigh. </p>
<p>IMO, take away this metric, the irrelevant Alumni Giving measurement, the ridiculous Graduation Differential and the corrupt and fraudulent PA scoring and then maybe we’d be a lot closer to a realistic ranking.</p>
<p>I’ve often thought that if SUNY had adopted a simple, costless rule for two to four of its state flagships, that applicants must be in the top 10% of the class (similar to California) to apply, that SUNY would be well respected today on a national basis.
But it didn’t happen. It is possible that the presence of private school competition in the Northeast would make duplicating the U of California difficult. However, there was a point in the 1970s when Stony Brook and Binghamton rivaled or topped Berkeley and UCLA on SAT scores.</p>
<p>SUNY is horrible when it comes to marketing themselves. For the tax rate in NY, the tax payers should be outraged that SUNY isn’t a well respected system. He-double-L, most people from states not contingent to NY have no idea what SUNY means and if they do, they don’t know the difference between Morrisville (SAT of ~850) and GENESEO (SAT ~1320).</p>
<p>You can clearly see it on here that Berkeley (and the other UCs) has a different admission system from the rest of the elite private schools as Berkeley considers class ranks and HS GPA more than they do consider SAT scores, which is a reverse at many top private schools.</p>
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<p>If not gaming, then how do you account for the fact that Harvard claims to know the class rank of 84% of its entering class, while Princeton claims to have such information for only 30%? I’m not saying it definitely is gaming; but it seems to me that in order to rule that out, you’ve got to have some alternative theory.</p>
<p>My first inclination given such a discrepancy would be to suspect gaming, because that’s pretty much the currency of the realm when it comes to the so-called “objective” US News factors. College and university administrators by and large despise the US News rankings, but they also watch them like hawks and will exploit any opportunity to nudge their own ranking upward. And I’m sorry, but the shopworn excuse that this or that factor counts for “only X%” of the total US News score won’t fly, because they’re on every factor like flies on s**t and even though gaining an edge in any single factor may not budge their ranking, even tiny edges in several factors might. So if not gaming, then what accounts for the extraordinary discrepancy?</p>
<p>Thanks for starting this thread hawkette. Once again it just goes to show that the objective numbers that are used by USNWR are oftentimes garbage. I trust the PA scores more.</p>