Here’s why Georgetown is more than the #32 smartest college

Georgetown has been dubbed the #32 smartest school in the USA by Business Insider, which is a huge compliment, but unfortunately their method was pretty rubbish, and here’s why.

The list of the 50 smartest schools was “based on the schools’ average standardized test scores.” Georgetown University ranked 32 with a reported average SAT score of 1414, not too shabby.

According to prepscholar.com, the average SAT for the United States was 1006. Clearly, we are at the higher part of the upper echelon of schools. But there are few critiques of this assessment.

First of all, it is based on SAT scores, something highly critiqued as an assessment of a person’s intelligence. They write, “research shows that both the SAT and ACT are good measures of general cognitive ability, since they rely on a person’s ability to reason.” But, more prestigious schools are going test-optional, which means that you are not required to send in your SAT or ACT scores. If they’re not good enough for Brown and Wake Forest, they’re not good enough for us.

Secondly, the rankings are all based on SAT, not SAT and ACT scores. Their method of judgment was based converting ACT scores to SAT scores, was imperfect at best. An ACT examination is out of 36 while an SAT is based out of 1600, so it’s obvious that there would be a degree of discrepancy between the results.

Thirdly, they wanted to find out “which schools enroll the smartest students.” That distinction is highly subjective in itself. There has been no accepted, comprehensive definition of smartness. There is a degree of bias in any judgment that claims to have ranked the smartest schools, since intelligence cannot be fully quantified.

With this in mind, it is still an impressive distinction. Georgetown appears to fall into “best/smartest” rankings between 15-35 in most lists. Each of you should be proud to say you are apart of this school’s community. Congrats, Hoyas.