by Ellen Kirkness ‘12

Most seniors who aspire to attend college have long since submitted five or six or fifteen applications to schools all over the nation. For most of these students, College Board is visited more often than Facebook and College Prowler has way more hits than Twitter. Checking how we stack up with scores from the schools we applied to has become a daily obsession. Turns out, last week Claremont McKenna, a prestigious California liberal arts college, admitted that it has been boosting SAT statistics for six years in a row to raise its place in national college rankings. According to Bob Schaeffer, education director at the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, this is not uncommon and there are hundreds of ways around colleges reporting accurate data about its applicants or graduates. So maybe the average reading SAT score at my top choice is a 680, or maybe that’s a number that has been inflated by 100 points. I feel betrayed. The countless hours I spent online were really just a waste. I quite possibly have been trying to measure up against false and unrealistic statistics. Colleges partaking in such deceit should be ashamed of themselves for making applicants feel like they don’t measure up when maybe they do after all.