Most educators understand the negative effects of high-stakes testing.
They know that the dangers associated with putting pressure on teachers and principals to get ever higher scores year after year or face terrible sanctions, including loss of their job, their reputation, and their school.
They know that it leads to cheating, gaming the system, narrowing of the curriculum, and teaching to the test.
Now we see that something similar is happening to higher education. But it is happening because of the U.S. News & World Report‘s annual rankings.
Emory cheated. It submitted phony data.
Emory is a great university. Why would officials do that?
The stakes are so high that they have to get those ratings.
K-12 educators understand their pain.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution covered the scandal:
Critics say the lists can’t be trusted, especially because they rely on data supplied by the schools and go through little fact-checking. They challenge the notion that a mathematical formula can sum up a college — its campus culture, the accessibility of its teachers, its academic quality. Making a decision based on rankings also can lead a student to the wrong school, a potentially expensive lesson.
Can a mathematical formula sum up a school or a teacher? Can a letter grade give an accurate portrait of a school?
Wouldn’t it be great if all the institutions of higher education refused to submit data to the magazine? It’s all about boosting sales. Why do the universities cooperate with U.S. News?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I imagine Emory isn’t the only one that fabricated its data. There’s a lot of subtle fudging going on all over the place–and with subtle fudging comes not-so-subtle fudging.
What about all the colleges that boost their application rates so that they can appear more selective? That, too, is a way of fudging the numbers–and it’s widespread. A New York Times article from 2010 describes this phenomenon in detail:
I wrote a satirical piece this week on the subject of data-fudging in higher education. When I wrote it, I wasn’t aware of the Emory story, but I might as well have been.
http://www.cronknews.com/2012/08/29/universitys-fake-following-sets-world-record/
The US News & World Report rankings for 2012 were based on incomplete data gathered by the National Council for Teacher Quality (NCTQ). NCTQ, a think tank formed in 2000 to “evaluate” colleges of education, wrote a “review” of university education programs limited to course syllabi and curriculum they solicited from universities. When these institutions rightly recognized that the NCQT inputs for valid program assessment were flawed, they protested to US News. US News replied that if the institutions did not submit to requests by NCQT, they would be rated as failing. In other words, by refusing to collaborate with a political think tank that routinely misuses and misinterprets data, universities would be labeled failing institutions for preparing educators. A university’s reputation may never recover from a poor ranking, yet US NEWs and NCQT are unaccountable to anyone.
This provokes a larger question: whose data are false?
This scholarly review of NCQT’s low quality research and data collection methods might provide some context about them:
http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-student-teaching
The credibility of US New’s rankings and their data sources should be carefully evaluated. US News and NCQT should be culpable for publishing flawed, inaccurate information when it is clear their own credibility is highly questionable.
You may have missed this post about NCTQ, which was originally posted on May 23:
This sad situation shows the opposite of the headline. Without a high stakes test being involved at all, cheaters will cheat on any information that is collected to judge quality.
The stakes are high based on self-reported information.
It is a “test” of sorts.
Not a good one.
I have suggested (many times and in many ways) that my university not engage NCTQ, and not comply with NCATE’s request to post test score averages, graduation rates, etc on our web site. Unfortunately the administrators in power feel they need to succumb to these requests…grrrr. . .
Why should your university help US News sell magazines? Their college ratings are the highest selling issue of the year.
How would you fix that? By not collecting information at all? Or by disciplining the cheaters? If there is other, more important information to be collected, what is it? And wouldn’t colleges that cheat just cheat on that? I don’t see a clear solution here.
Diane, I think our University President thinks the NCTQ study is somehow good for the University. We are the only institution in our state that participated. We have tried to inform him about the nature of NCTQ but of course he has swallowed the reform kool aid hook line and sinker. He is also moving to make admission to our Teacher Education programs dependent on a state wide standardized test (from Pearson of course) that has been demonstrated to discriminate against students of color and ELL students. So much for diversifying our profession!
That is bizarre. The agenda here is to make everything in education dependent on high-stakes testing. Who benefits?
My response to the question posed, can a mathematical formula sum up a teacher or school is as follows: These types of formulas have been utilized for years to sum up student’s performance, so why not apply them to those who have been using them to evaluate the students they are supposed to be teaching? I think these formulas will work well if they data provided is truthful and not manipulated to provide better than actual statistics.