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Paul L. Caron
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Monday, July 30, 2018

Temple’s Ranking Scandal Spreads To Six Additional Programs; University Also Admits To Three Errors In The Data It Submitted For Its Undergraduate College Ranking

Temple LogoFollowing up on my previous posts:

Temple Press Release, Second Update on Rankings:

The university has been carefully scrutinizing rankings data submissions to identify misreporting for other Fox programs. Although the review is ongoing, we have concluded that misreporting similar to that involving the Online MBA also occurred with respect to the Executive MBA, Global MBA, Part-Time MBA, Master of Science in Human Resource Management and Master of Science in Digital Innovation in Marketing. These programs all had issues related to the reporting of one or more metrics, including the number of new entrants providing GRE/GMAT scores, student indebtedness and applicants’ undergraduate GPAs. For the Online Bachelor of Business Administration, misreporting related to student indebtedness was found. As a result, we have reported to U.S. News that we cannot verify data related to these programs, and we are not participating in or submitting business school surveys at this time. ...

In a related update, U.S. News asked Temple to provide a letter verifying the accuracy of our data submissions for the 2018 and 2019 Best Colleges rankings. The university conducted a painstaking review of the voluminous data contained in these submissions. On July 20, Temple provided U.S. News with the requested letter, in which we verified the accuracy of our submissions for both the 2018 and 2019 rankings. We also made three corrections: one inadvertent transposition and two typographical errors. Additionally, we updated originally reported endowment information to ensure consistency in survey responses. U.S. News also had requested information on additional programs, and that review is underway.

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2018/07/temples-ranking-scandal-spreads-to-six-additional-programs-university-also-admits-to-three-errors-in.html

Law School Rankings, Legal Education | Permalink

Comments

Law graduates' employment outcome data should be gathered and audited by outside accounting firms instead of by the law schools themselves, which have great self-interest in this data. Now that data-tampering has spread to other academic programs, maybe those in charge will see the light(?)

Posted by: Old Ruster | Jul 31, 2018 10:49:02 AM

Somehow these errors seem to be primarily in the schools' favor.

Posted by: Mike Livingston | Jul 31, 2018 3:23:09 AM

Old but still relevant: "A most unlikely collection of suspects - law schools, their deans, U.S. News & World Report and its employees - may have committed felonies by publishing false information as part of U.S. News' ranking of law schools. The possible federal felonies include mail and wire fraud, conspiracy, racketeering, and making false statements.... U.S. News itself may have committed mail and wire fraud. It has republished, and sold for profit, data submitted by law schools without verifying the data's accuracy, despite being aware that at least some schools were submitting false and misleading data. U.S. News refused to correct incorrect data and rankings errors and continued to sell that information even after individual schools confessed that they had submitted false information. In addition, U.S. News marketed its surveys and rankings as valid although they were riddled with fundamental methodological errors."

Law Deans in Jail, Morgan Cloud & George B. Shepherd of Emory Law, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1990746

Posted by: Unemployed Northeastern | Jul 30, 2018 7:24:41 AM