No need to explain. I’ve been reading your posts for a very long time and it never crossed my mind that your motives were nefarious. I know you to be a ranking enthusiast and truth seeker.
I myself have to apologize and need to better recognize that my sarcasm doesn’t always come across clearly for everybody. But just to be clear, almost all my posts today about the rankings and movements were entirely tongue-in-cheek, which is consistent my previously stated view of the relative importance of numerical rankings of schools. With that said, I hope you will change your mind about my apparent comfort level with misinformation. I have no such comfort level.
On that point, while I, too, have no real idea about the discrepancy you were able to uncover in your investigations, it might be worth considering that, at least to my best knowledge, Wesleyan is one of a pretty small number of TO schools that require all matriculating students to submit their scores before they enroll. So, all TO kids at Wes have to report the scores that they didn’t want to report. And it is those numbers, I believe, that Wesleyan reports to the world in its CDS. The numbers on their website under “Profile of the Class of ____” are the numbers they have in their possession well before the TO students submit their scores.
If we’re concerned about transparency and accuracy, then I would think we would be curious about the fact that Wes’ apples have historically been compared to most other schools’ oranges. Those missing numbers would no doubt bring peer composites down. Or at least that’s what I would expect.
I took a quick look at the methodology write-up. I’m not going to be able to figure this out, but I note that Wesleyan’s rise could also be explained by several of the changes (increase and decrease) in weighting of particular factors. These include: increase in weight to student debt and Wes’ new “no loan” policy; increase in weight to faculty pay, where Wes has always done well; increase in weight to student/teacher ratio, where Wes again does well; decrease in weight in spending per student, where Wes pays a price for being a little larger than its peers; and I’m sure others.
I don’t know what US News does with Wes’ test numbers. Maybe they used the CDS numbers in the model and published the others in the profile. IDK. Consider calling or emailing US News and point it out. I doubt anybody here is going to do anything about it.