<p>Why doesn’t UPenn have a standard Common Data Set? The link posted is good, but it’s also less information that what other schools provide. (I posted this question in the UPenn area too.) TIA.</p>
<p>mrscollege-- if you believe the banter on this board, and in this case I do, Penn has a long history of being a data manipulator (fudge their numbers to look good), so the theory is, I guess, that the less info they put out publicly, the less that can be held against them. Transparency is not their mantra.</p>
<p>[ps…& I’m a Penn alum…I love the school, but not their opacity principle.]</p>
<p>So why the secrecy? [Well, we know why for Penn]</p>
<p>UNIVERSITIES (14 total that I found)
Penn
Columbia
Chicago
Duke
Washinton U
Johns Hopkins
Rice
Notre Dame
Georgetown
U Southern California
Tufts
Boston College
U Rochester
Tulane</p>
<p>I believe a vast number of schools simply lie on their data reporting. Many years ago I worked with a man who had spent several years in the administration of an ACC school well-regarded as a strong academic institution. He said that his school absolutely lied on its data (e.g. test scores of enrolled students) by excluding certain demographic groups of students who had poor test scores. I believe many schools do that–but cannot back that up with anything concrete. </p>
<p>It would, however, be interesting to look at, say, the ACT scores posted by all US colleges and see whether the composite yields a believeable number. For example, you check the common “middle 50% ACT” versus ACT percentiles and calculate how many students fall into the upper group. If a school says its “middle 50%” is 27-31, I believe that means 25% had 32 or higher. I believe the upper group in aggregate would exceed the number of USA students who scored that high. If 4% of test takers score higher than 30 on the ACT and 1,200,000 students take the test each year, that means 48,000 actually score that high. I’ll bet that a review of college websites would yield a number much much higher than 48,000. Hope I’m not being too cyncical…</p>
<p>Common Data Set data is supposed to be about ENROLLED students, so, yes, the total number of students reported by colleges above this or that score on the ACT should be no more than the total number of students in the relevant high school class who obtained scores that high.</p>
<p>Although I found info on the college data site, I cannot find the actual CDS for these schools:
Clark University, Worcester, MA
Union College, Schenectady, NY</p>
<p>Clark lists an institutional research office (the normal administrative office home for CDS’s) in their directory, but with no link…hence it appears that Clark would rather not have their information public.</p>