<p>Hey is college data accurate? Is like the information for average gpa and sats accurate?</p>
<p>Basically, yes.</p>
<p>Every year, most colleges publish something called a common data set. They all have the same format (which is why they’re called common). In Section C of every common data set, colleges and universities report figures for the most recently enrolled freshman class: how many applied, how many were accepted, average high-school gpa of currently enrolled freshmen, 25th- and 75th-percentile SAT and ACT scores of currently admitted freshmen, and so on.</p>
<p>Colleges don’t fudge these data. Recently somebody did (anybody remember which institution?), and it resulted in a big scandal, in which high-ranking university officials resigned.</p>
<p>The figures that you see reported on this web site, on the College Board’s site, and elsewhere are all taken from common data sets. You could theoretically come across a site that still lists year-old information, but most of the time the numbers don’t change all that much from one year to the next.</p>
<p>It was Claremont Mckenna that fudged data, if I recall correctly.</p>
<p>As noted above, the collegeboard website is good for comparable data. The numbers on a college’s own website may be twisted and reworded so they are hard to compare. One extra word can really change the meaning of a statistic.</p>
<p>So it was. Thanks.</p>
<p>Suffice it to say, the Common Data Set does not impose perfect consistency on the data. Even if schools are not deliberately falsifying their numbers, you can’t always assume two identical admit rates, GPA averages, or student:faculty ratios necessarily mean the same thing for two very different schools.</p>