Updated for AP style 8/31/2020 6:22 p.m.

Updated 9/1/2020 2:46 p.m.

As a result of misreported data to the U.S. News and World Report in July, SIU will not be ranked as an institution this year by the site.

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According to Southern Illinois University–Carbondale – Profile, Rankings and Data | US News Best Colleges, SIU is not ranked because of misreported SAT scores.

“The school originally reported that its fall 2018 entering class average score on the SAT evidence-based reading and writing portions was 646 and that the average score on SAT math was 638,” US News said. 

SIU later corrected this mistake and said entering class average was actually 564 for SAT reading and writing portions and 555 for the math portion.

SIU Spokeswoman Rae Goldsmith, said this was an honest, human error that SIU quickly reported before last year’s rankings were published.

According to US News, “SAT and ACT test scores have a weight of 7.75% in the Best Colleges ranking methodology.”

Less than 0.1% of schools that are ranked inform US News that their data was misreported.

Because of this, SIU was moved to the “Unranked” category by US News, meaning SIU does not receive a numerical rank, according to US News.

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“When we were preparing the submission for the upcoming rankings, we noticed that U.S. News had not made the correction, and we did the right thing by reporting it again,” Goldsmith said. “U.S. News moved us to unranked status at that time.”

Being moved to an unranked status is not necessarily a downgrade and SIU has no reason to believe this error will affect future ratings, Goldsmith said.

A list of other unranked schools and their data reporting issues can be found here: US News Ranking Updates.

Staff reporter Keaton Yates can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @keatsians.

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