Claremont McKenna College, one of California's prestigious Claremont Colleges, falsified SAT data in an effort to boost its national rankings. The deception, purportedly made by the former Dean of Admissions, had been going on since 2005. You can learn more in an article on the scandal in the New York Times.
This latest news is just one more sad story related to the great importance placed on standardized tests. Last year was filled with high school cheating scandals, and it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise to learn that colleges cheat, too, in an effort to make themselves look better. The scores coming out of Claremont McKenna weren't inflated much, but every ten points matters in the ranking methodologies of publications like U.S. News & World Report.
College applicants should realize that almost all SAT and ACT data they come across is inflated in one way or another. Most colleges do not count special admits in the the data they present to the public, so a "special talent" student such as an athlete or a high risk student admitted through an opportunity program may not be part of the data we all see. This is one reason I like the GPA, SAT and ACT graphs at cappex.com -- the numbers are coming straight from the applicants themselves, not via the colleges' sometimes dubious self-reporting practices (as an example, check out the Cappex graph for Claremont McKenna).
If you want to avoid the whole standardized test mess altogether, be sure to check out the 850 test-optional colleges.
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