In protest of the way in which the US News and World Report rankings portray the University community, several universities across the country have refused to fill out the peer review survey, an important component of the Report.

Christopher Nelson, president of St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, said that he would not fill out the surveys because he believes that rankings do a disservice to prospective students and their families.

“It is about the students. We know that families need valuable information in order to exercise freedom of choice. You want to look at [many factors] and we ought to be providing those, but they are missing from any of these rankings,” said Nelson, who has not filled out the survey in ten years.

The peer review component of the survey is worth 25 percent of the overall ranking and asks college and university presidents to rank other schools on a 1-to-5 scale.

Robert Morse, US News director of data analysis, said that the rankings should not be taken as more than a collection of statistics and that the colleges protesting against the rankings falsely accuse them of measuring things that US News does not examine.

“US News has never portrayed the rankings as having the ability to measure everything about an institution, and they are not meant to be a tool to compare all aspects of the school, what is going on in the classroom, what students are actually learning,” he said. “The schools themselves are not measuring those things either.”

The US News rankings system is one of the most comprehensive and is thought by supporters of the survey to represent an objective measure of the education provided by different schools.

Another school that has issues with the US News rankings system is Sarah Lawrence College (SLC) in Bronxville, NY. SLC stopped including SAT scores in its admissions criteria and thus could not submit the scores to US News.

SLC’s president then claimed that US News devised a formula to estimate what the students’ scores would be; a formula that Sarah Lawrence officials say is not representative.

“We do not feel that the way US News represents us is accurate,” said Judith Schwartzstein, SLC’s director of media and community relations. “They cannot come up with an accurate representation in the absence of real data.”

The decisions of some schools to refrain from taking the US News survey comes as part of a larger movement among liberal arts colleges to personalize the admissions process.

Nelson stated that placing colleges on a numerical ranking reduces their value while eliminating crucial evaluation of the college experience.

“Student experience cannot be captured by a number on a scale from one to 3000,” he said. “I think we are perpetuating an evil when we participate in the rankings because they are not giving the families anything valuable at all. They do not make any effort to measure anything that is important. What is important is what is going on in the classroom, what students are learning.”

Despite his actions, Nelson does not believe that the protests of St. Johns or the several other colleges against US News will have any real effect on the magazine.

“I do not think we are going to have any influence on US News,” he said. “We are not boycotting because we think they will stop. We are boycotting because we think it’s wrong.”

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