In February, Flagler College in Florida announced that it had misreported admissions data of incoming freshmen for several years and that it would supply U.S. News with corrected data that were used in the Best Colleges rankings. The school has issued an update, confirming that it submitted inflated fall 2012 admissions data that were used in last year’s Best Colleges rankings, which are no longer published on our website now that the 2015 edition of the rankings has been released.
The revised data were contained in an Investigative Report commissioned by Flagler College’s Board of Trustees and conducted by the law firms McGuireWoods and D’Alemberte & Palmer.
Flagler’s president, Dr. William T. Abare Jr., had called for this investigation to determine the reason for, and the source of, the discrepancies as a result of the February discovery by a faculty member that there were suspicious data inconsistencies between reported and actual freshman SAT and ACT scores.
U.S. News analyzed Flagler’s revised fall 2012 admissions data and found it would have resulted in the school’s numerical rank being lower than what U.S. News published in the 2014 edition of the rankings, where Flagler was ranked at No. 8 in the Regional Colleges (South) category. If Flagler had reported its corrected data sooner, U.S. News would have moved the school to the ” Unranked” category in the 2014 edition of the Best Colleges rankings on usnews.com due to the discrepancies in the rankings. Unranked means that U.S. News did not calculate numerical rankings for these schools.
The report’s key findings said that “in hundreds of cases, SAT and ACT scores have been fabricated; high school grade point averages (“GPA”), manipulated; and low high school class rank values for certain freshman students, deleted. Consequently, the academic profile reported by the College for its incoming freshman class has been artificially inflated since 2004.” The report noted that these data were also misreported to the U.S. Department of Education, the Princeton Review and Wintergreen Orchard House.
Flagler College officials said that for the school’s fall 2012 class the correct average SAT math score was 508 and SAT critical reading score was 523, compared with the incorrect SAT math score of 552 and SAT critical reading score of 565 that were originally reported to U.S. News, a combined 86-point difference.
In terms of ACT composite scores, the correct average was 22, compared with the 24 originally reported.
For high school class standing, the proportion of entering freshmen from the top 25 percent was corrected to 32.6 percent from the originally reported 45 percent.
The average SAT and ACT scores have a weight of 8.125 percent, and high school class standing a weight of 3.125, in the Best Colleges ranking methodology.
U.S. News received a letter from Flagler College’s president, which noted that McGuireWoods had certified the accuracy of the fall 2013 admissions statistics submitted to U.S. News for the recently published 2015 Best Colleges rankings.
U.S. News will continue to handle each case of data misreporting on an individual basis.
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Update on Flagler College’s Data Misreporting originally appeared on usnews.com
