Yo, Wesleying’s Senior College Ranking Fuckery Correspondent is here and reporting for duty. Last week The Economist told us we’re #623, and now Business Insider is proclaiming that Wesleyan is #40 on their list of top 50 smartest colleges.
What absurd criteria did BI use for calculating their rankings? They went with a very fun and very biased, classist, racist, awful thing called standardized test scores (I think even frosh in intro soc can explain how this is problematic).
Here’s my favorite quote from BI about why they decided that using SAT/ACT scores was a fab idea:
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
And here are specifics for how BI claims their ranking works:
- BI looked at the SAT/ACT scores for colleges covered by US News & World Report. As you know from previous posts, we think US News can eat shit and die.
- ACT scores (which are meaningless) were converted to SAT scores (also meaningless) using a random ass conversion chart (100000% meaningless) so that there was ~*~one metric~*~. So scientific!!!!!!!!!!
- They averaged the 25th and 75 percentiles. So mathematical.
This whole ordeal is made particularly hilarious by the fact that our admissions office went test-optional in Spring 2014. #womp
To cut to the chase of how many peer schools (‘CAC and other liberal arts schools) are better than us on this list, here’s a quick summary:
- Pomona College (#15)
- Williams College (#17)
- Amherst College (tied #20)
- Swarthmore College (tied #20)
- Bowdoin College (#22)
- Tufts University (#24)
- Claremont McKenna College (#27)
- Carleton College (#31)
- Haverford College (#32)
- Vassar College (#33)
- Grinnell College (#34)
- Hamilton College (#37)
Lastly, we tied with Wellesley College for #40, thus further proving that we are slowly morphing into a single, unified Wellesleyan.