<p>tom,
If your point is that the metric of using Top 10% students as a meaningful metric for ranking colleges is a BAD idea, then I would most heartily agree. As it relates to this example, however, I’m not so sure that there is gaming going on. I can see how a school like UCSD, with 97% IS enrollment and about 5000 entering students each fall, could easily fill its class with Top 10% scorers. California has a population of 38 million. Meanwhile, Cornell is known to have a holistic admissions process and class rank is not a particularly strong factor among the various criteria that they weigh. </p>
<p>IMO, take away this metric, the irrelevant Alumni Giving measurement, the ridiculous Graduation Differential and the corrupt and fraudulent PA scoring and then maybe we’d be a lot closer to a realistic ranking.</p>