Over the past year, five colleges have admitted to submitting false admissions data to the U.S. News & World Report, but Senior Vice President for Students and Enrollment Andrew Flagel says Brandeis has remained consistent with its reporting practices and data collection.

On Jan. 25, Bucknell University became the most recent undergraduate college to disclose that it had misreported its numbers. The university excluded students from the initially reported SAT and ACT scores from 2006 up until 2011. Tulane University's Freeman School of Business also admitted to providing inflated GMAT scores and statistics in January.

Although according to a Feb. 4 update on the U.S. News & World Report website the numerical difference in the corrected data for Bucknell was not significant enough to warrant a change in its ranking, a U.S. News & World Report did revoke the Freeman School of Business' ranking.

According to the update, "U.S. News will continue to handle each instance of data misreporting on a case-by-case basis."

Last year, Claremont McKenna College admitted to misreporting data in January, while Emory University admitted to misreporting data in August. The George Washington University did not admit to misreporting until November.

The disclosure of this misreporting led to increased controversy regarding the accuracy of US News & World Report college rankings, among others, as these sources unintentionally used falsified information provided by schools in order to rank them.

In an interview with the Justice, Flagel shared an anecdote to illustrate the complexity and confusion involved with the ranking process.

"One of my colleagues, from a very prestigious institution, was sharing his feelings about schools that report partial applicants as applicants. 'How dare they count partial applicants! If they ask you how many applicants, you should only count complete applicants!'" said Flagel. "And I said, 'That seems very reasonable; let me ask you, what's a complete applicant?'"

"[U.S. News & World Report doesn't] define what a complete applicant is, and we all have different requirements for a completed applicant," he continued.

Exclusion of certain information, although an offense of several of the schools on the list of those that provided falsified data, is a debated topic due to varying definitions and application requirements.

Therefore, a unified method of ranking might allow for shortcomings regardless. Brandeis, which is currently ranked 33 on the US News & World Report college rankings, has no history of misreporting data to rankings.

"I'm on the educational advisory board for the US News & World Report rankings, so I go a couple of times a year to meet with their editorial team and talk about just these issues," said Flagel. "Since I've been here, I'm very comfortable that everything we're doing here is consistent with how they ask the questions."

Superscoring on the SAT and ACT is another un-standardized practice among all universities that provide data for ranking. "There's schools that also do it on the ACT. The ACT is normed, so you shouldn't do that, because your composite score on the ACT is already normed to it," said Flagel. "But there's still folks who do it, because it makes their numbers look better ... So are they being dishonest, are they deceiving?"

Although Flagel plans to aim high for the University's rankings, he acknowledges further limitation with the system. "Bear in mind, the purpose of the US News & World Report is to sell US News & World Report. It's not to be the best college tool ever: it's to sell a website," said Flagel. "If the same schools weren't at the top all the time in that, it wouldn't be nearly as successful. So the things that it weights are interesting to breakdown."

-Sam Mintz contributed reporting