Mea Culpa

I hate getting things wrong.

The previous post, which appeared in yesterday’s “Admissions Insider” in Inside Higher Ed, contained a major factual error, and I am both embarrassed and appalled by it.

The second paragraph of the piece wondered whether the Fiske Guide to College’s decision to stop reporting test score ranges in a test-optional landscape would be followed by the U.S. News college rankings.  In so doing I reported that U.S. News had announced last summer that it would not rank test-blind colleges, and followed that up by expressing my fervent wish that U.S. News would list all colleges as unranked.  It was a throwaway paragraph, not germane to the main argument in the article.

Except that through a combination of misreading and misremembering, I got U.S. News’s announcement from last summer ass-backwards.  They actually announced that that they would begin ranking test-blind colleges. 

Madeline Smanik, the Communications & Public Relations Manager for U.S. News and World Report, reached out yesterday afternoon to point out the mistake, “I saw your article about the U.S. News Best Colleges rankings, and I’m writing to ask for a correction. Your article states “back in the summer U.S. News did announce that it would designate test-blind colleges as ‘unranked.’” But that is not what we announced. In June, we announced that we will rank test-blind schools.”

Here’s the actual announcement.

There’s no excuse for the mistake.  I regret it and apologize to U.S. News for the misinformation (which was in no way intended to be disinformation).