The Princeton Review has decided to void a number of responses from Penn for the company's annual guidebook due to worries about perceived bias.
The company made the decision after The Daily Pennsylvanian reported that the Admissions office did not seek a random sample of students to respond to the survey, despite a request to do so from the Princeton Review, said Robert Franek, the author of the Princeton Review's Best 366 Colleges.
The Princeton Review has no formal mechanism to verify that colleges try to get a random sample.
Penn's Admissions Office forwarded a link to the online survey only to the members of the Kite and Key Society, a group of undergraduate volunteers who serve as ambassadors of the Penn community, through the group's listserv.
Franek, who was not aware of the Admissions Office's decision at the time, said that although the survey data appeared representative, the company "didn't want there to be any possibility about the perception of bias."
Interim Dean of Admissions Eric Kaplan, who was not informed of the Princeton Review's decision until yesterday, wrote in an e-mail that "it is the prerogative of the Princeton Review to survey whomever they choose" and that he trusts that Penn will be reasonably represented in the next edition.
To survey current students, the company posts the survey online year-round but also relies on administrators at the schools to distribute the link to a representative sample of current students.
Because they could not determine which responses came from members of Kite and Key and which ones came from other students, Princeton Review disregarded all surveys received from Penn from shortly before the e-mail was sent to Kite and Key members on Jan. 21 through approximately the next three to four weeks.
This is only the second time the Princeton Review has voided surveys from a school.
Some of Macalester College's responses were voided in 2001 after the administration tried to influence responses so the school would not appear on the "Students Ignore God on a Regular Basis" list after complaints from alumni.
The surveys have checks in place, such as e-mail verification, to try and prevent bias from entering the survey pool, but Franek said the company mainly "relies on [their] connections" with university administrators to reach individual students.
The Admissions Office chose to send the link and an encouraging prompt to the Kite and Key listserv to reach a "cross representation of students as quickly as possible," Kaplan wrote.
Whether the Princeton Review's decision will have an adverse effect on the organization's accountability or on Penn has yet to be determined.
"Most students don't believe what the admissions office [at any school] says in the first place," college consultant Steve Goodman said, comparing Penn's actions to "artificially affecting a stock price."
"The students and families are clamoring for third-party information, so if there's even a whiff [of impropriety] the value of that guide goes down considerably," he said, adding that he thought the "Princeton Review acted rationally given what happened."
However, in the end, all students "just want to get in," and probably will not focus on this incident, college consultant Michele Hernandez said, pointing to a 2002 incident where Princeton officials hacked into Yale's computer system to access student records. Neither school's prestige or desirability were affected, despite an FBI probe.
Tracey Zhao, a high-school junior from Michigan, said she would still trust the validity of a guidebook if certain students were encouraged to answer, she said, because, "a school does want to showcase its best parts, but it is all true."
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