The Oldest College Newspaper in Pennsylvania

The Lafayette

The Oldest College Newspaper in Pennsylvania

The Lafayette

The Oldest College Newspaper in Pennsylvania

The Lafayette

Bucknell inflates SAT scores

By Michael Kelley ‘14

From 2006 to 2012, Bucknell inflated the average SAT scores of incoming freshmen to various organizations—including those that produce annual rankings, university officials disclosed last weekend.

Over the seven-year period, enrollment management omitted the math and reading scores of 13 to 47 students, causing a 16-point increase in the school’s average SAT score.

President John C. Bravman released the information in a statement to the university’s board of trustees and over 55,000 alumni, faculty, and students.

“These numerical omissions, as relatively small as they were, violated the trust of every student, faculty member, staff member, and Bucknellian they reached,” Bravman said in the statement.

The false scores were discovered by Bill Conley, the new vice president for enrollment management.

While Bravman says it is unclear why Bucknell’s scores were misreported, it is well-known that average SAT scores factor into national rankings. In 2013, U.S. News & World Report placed Bucknell 32nd among national liberal arts colleges and in the top 10 for its undergraduate engineering programs.

Corrective actions are already underway.

“We are correcting the historical mistakes to all institutions that received errant information,” Bravman said.

Bucknell is by no means the first school to report faulty data. In the past year alone, George Washington University, Emory University, Claremont McKenna College, and Tulane University’s business school have admitted to misreporting data.

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