So much for the overhyped ‘Top College’ listing foolishness then.
Claremont McKenna College is under fire for exaggerating the collective SAT exam scores of incoming freshman classes for the last six years, boosting statistics used for national school rankings.
A senior official in the school’s admissions office has taken responsibility and resigned, according to an announcement Monday by the school president.
“As an institution of higher education with a deep and consistent commitment to the integrity of all our academic activities, and particularly our reporting of institutional data, we take this situation very seriously,” President Pamela B. Gann wrote in a memo distributed at the prestigious liberal arts college, which enrolls about 1,321 students.
The school, in Claremont, refused to identify the official who resigned.
If they lied about their student’s scores they probably lied about the ‘person’ responsible resigning too. If there was in fact just one person anyway. If the lying went on for 6 years it’s systemic, not individual. Or are we to believe that administrators read the US News listing each year and thought ‘why that sure does sound right, doesn’t it?’ without raising an eyebrow or a question. Or is it the sort of school where only one person knows what’s going on?
Cheating students, plagiarizing, lying administrators, dishonesty. That’s what the whole ‘accreditation’ industry brings to life. When you have to do anything but educate as an institution of higher learning, you lose the point. This sort of debauchery didn’t happen in American Universities and Colleges before the 1960′s, when ‘accrediting’ became the passport to more and more money.
Claremont isn’t alone either. I suspect that if one school is cheating, many more are- just as when one student in a school is cheating, many more are too. Anything for a buck I suppose. It’s the American way…
whitney
01/02/2012 at 11:05
This school is a problem in many ways.
http://articles.latimes.com/2004/apr/05/local/me-dunn5