When numbers lie

When Claremont McKenna College announced in late January that it had falsified the SAT scores in its report to the U.S. News and World Report, the issue kicked off a story that tells us less about the foibles of a small California liberal arts college than the knife-edge level of competition in higher education.

Since its creation in 1983, the U.S. News and World Report’s college rankings have fueled competition and anxiety among universities in the United States. These rankings are highly influential. A change in a university’s rank impacts some less important areas of university life, like the number of applications and rate of matriculation. But they can impact important areas as well, like the quality of faculty and alumni donations. The SAT scores of a university’s incoming class affect these rankings, though less so than you would expect.

Claremont McKenna’s SAT score farce—which went uncovered for a full six years—will pay negative dividends for the college. This embarrassing move by Richard C. Vos, the college’s vice president and dean of admissions, will probably cost Claremont McKenna its ninth place ranking among liberal arts colleges, even though Vos only inflated the scores 10 points at the 25th percentile and 30 points at the 75th percentile.

In the end, the scandal is less a signal of Richard Vos’ moral shortcomings than of a system that incentivizes bad behavior. The U.S. News and World Report pressures students and admissions offices to earn—or at least to report—high SAT scores. It is no surprise that this level of competition leads to humiliating deceptions like the one at Claremont—and to a culture that prizes numbers far more than it should.

There are good reasons to give SAT scores less weight in college rankings. The SAT primarily aims to measure a student’s analytic intelligence, and it is not clear that it does a good job at that. There are many kinds of intelligence—interpersonal, say, or musical—that can add a lot a person and a university community. Analytic intelligence does not tell the whole story.

And, even if it did, the SAT does a questionable job of measuring it. Affluence and, in particular, SAT preparatory courses, can have a tremendous influence on a student’s scores.

We cannot write off the value of a standardized test. SAT scores are useful because they are standardized and uniform. Unlike grade point average and other factors considered in the admissions process, SAT scores need not be adjusted to compare students. SAT scores also reliably predict a students academic performance in college.

But we also have good reason to just care less about SAT scores, regardless of what they tell us. Believe it or not, SAT score ranges only make up 7.5 percent of a college’s U.S. News and World Report ranking. If we focus on attracting interesting students and bright faculty, we do not need to worry about SAT scores.