The U.S. News and World Report retracted the high national ranking of UW-Madison’s graduate engineering program after finding the school reported incorrect application and acceptance rates.
U.S. News Chief Data Strategist Robert Morse said in a Wednesday blog post that the university recently advised that some data used to calculate the program’s ranking in the 2017 Best Graduate Schools was not correct. The initial data analyzed placed the engineering program at 14th overall.
The school said while the originally reported application number for the program was 9,338, the correct number was 6,172, according to Morse’s post.
Morse said the school also reported its acceptance number as 833, but the actual acceptance number was 1,154. Additionally, the school claimed an 8.9 percent acceptance rate for Fall 2015 master’s and doctoral program applicants, but the correct rate was 18.7 percent.
These discrepancies, Morse said, caused the program to seem more selective and therefore be ranked higher than it would have been using the correct data.
After the error was confirmed, U.S. News gave the engineering program an “Unranked” status, which Morse said will last until the next publication of Best Engineering Schools rankings and until the university can confirm the accuracy of its next data set.
UW-Madison spokeswoman Meredith McGlone said that after questions were raised about the misreported data, the university pursued the matter using staff outside the program who were not involved in the data submission.
McGlone said the university found errors in how the database queries were written, but no indication that the numbers had been deliberately falsified.
“Going forward, UW-Madison is reviewing data reporting practices to ensure accuracy,” McGlone said.
Morse said rankings for individual programs within the larger graduate engineering program, such as chemical engineering and nuclear engineering, will not change because those rankings are calculated based on a separate methodology.
