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<p>I don’t think it’s “gained acceptance.” I think very few people understand what US News is doing with these numbers, which are therefore highly misleading. By systematically misreporting SAT 25th and 75th percentiles, US News may needlessly discourage people from applying to some schools, and mislead them into applying to other schools where they have no realistic chance because the numbers in US News are, to put it bluntly, inaccurate. Say you’re looking for a “safety,” a school with a high acceptance rate where all your stats are in the top quartile. You look at school X in US News and see that it has an acceptance rate in the range you’re looking for, but your composite SAT CR+M score is just below the US News-reported 75th percentile. You may elect not to apply to school X based on this misinformation—when in fact your SAT scores do in fact fall within the top quartile of the school’s ACTUAL SAT CR+M scores.</p>
<p>Same at the bottom end. Some students may elect to apply to elite schools as “reaches” as long as their SAT scores fall into the “middle 50%” as reported by US News. But the US News-reported 25th percentile CR + M score at the most selective colleges is almost always going to be lower than the school’s ACTUAL 25th percentile CR+M. That’s because most of the enrolled students who scored in the bottom quartile in CR will not also have scored in the bottom quartile in M, and vice versa. You might think you’re just barely making the middle 50%, when in fact you may be down around the 15th percentile—i.e., such a longshot that you might well elect not to apply if you knew where you actually stood. So you’re wasting your money and your time on the basis of misinformation supplied by US News. People don’t “accept” that; they just don’t know it.</p>
<p>The US News methodology is also systematically misleading in another way: they don’t get these same distortions with schools that report ACT scores instead of SAT scores. That’s because everyone uses a single composite ACT score; consequently, there’s just a single, uniform 25th and 75th percentile ACT figures for schools reporting the ACT. There are simply not multiple scores to add together, as US News does with the SAT. Consequently, schools that report SAT scores are always going to look stronger at the top end (due to US News’ systematic distortion) than schools that report ACT scores. You see this sort of thing on CC all the time: “School A is stronger than school B because school A’s 75th percentile SAT is 1400 while school B’s i5th percentile ACT is 31, which translates to a 1380 SAT.” Yes, but you’re comparing apples and oranges because school B’s US News-reported ACT 75th percentile is accurate while school A’s US News-reported SAT figure is in all likelihood inflated by 10 to 30 points.</p>