Bribery

In general I'm not a fan of ranking systems in the sense that they often times are arbitrary and infused with others sense of what's important. So in college football you often find teams that score a lot of points ranked higher despite often giving up a lot of points, or conversely an SEC team ranked higher than teams with similar records simply because they are in the SEC. Generally though within sports these things can work themselves out. The overranked team will eventually play against a better team (and as Buckeye fan I know about that, though I contend the loss to Florida had more to do with us than them).

For academics no such direct competition exists though schools do compete with one another for better students, faculty and whatever. And often that competition rests on how a school is perceived and evaluated by publications like U.S. News. These rankings are greatly affected by things like spending on instruction, admittance rates, and quality of incoming student. One aspect that is often left out is whether the institution actually educates its students while their in college, or whether they are more/less a finishing school. That said rankings do have some value in that we know that certain institutions are likely better than others, and rankings provide a crude way of assessing those differences.

One would like to assume that institutions are acting in a manner in keeping with their mission and values and not trying to game the system to get better rankings. Such an assumption is obviously foolhardy, but still the audacity of what Baylor is doing is astounding. Baylor is bribing it's freshman class to retake the SAT in order to improve the test scores of it's freshman class, and thus enhance Baylor's reputation. Yikes!