Lumniosity created a series of brain exercises and administered them to 90,000 college students across the country. The results of the tests were used to indicate what colleges are the smartest in the country. The white paper detailing the results was released and it looks like MIT is the smartest college in the country, with Harvard and Stanford following suite.
Some big surprises are University of Portland at 13 and Wash U in STL at 6. Dook placed 10. Princeton showed it's true target school colors by placing at 39.
Obviously I don't take these rankings very seriously and I don't want to make any of my Princeton friends on this site angry as I know they're a great school but I thought it was just something interesting to share!
http://venturebeat.com/2012/11/01/smartest-colleges-in-america/
To save people some time, here are the top 50 in "smartest college" rankings:
Look at the full study with schools that didn't even place in top 50. Columbia, NYU, etc.
I think there was a thread on this a while back. Personally, I don't think WUSTL at 6 is an enormous surprise. The student body there usually ranks high in standardized testing (top 10ish?), which might somewhat correlate with "intelligence" testing. Not sure how Duke is a surprise at 10. Sounds reasonable enough. I think Portland and Rose Hulman are the big shockers here. I also imagine the sample size at Portland and Rose Hulman are pretty small.
It also looks like the science/engineering schools did pretty well here (RPI, WPI, Case, etc...)
Everybody know St.Olaf>>>JHU
Very true. Duke being at 10 is nothing surprising; I just said that to give them a hard time.
Also, I think the fact that more "quantitatively" oriented schools place higher is definitely a reflection of how the brain teasers were set up. Ultimately those sorts of tests are better for people with quick, mathematically oriented minds which is why a school like MIT will top the list. Wash U has a large pre-med/engineering program so those kids probably made up the majority of the test takers. Had this been a test on world history and literature analysis I'm sure the results would have been very different.
I don't think it is a test in that sense. While I'm sure it is a lot of brain teasers, I think a lot of it is similar to an IQ test (logic, decuctive/inductive reasoning, puzzles, problem solving, etc.)
wonder if op goes to NC State or UNC. No one gives a shit about this tests, but yes, in general MIT kids have a very quant background (which I assume they were tested on for this ranking). Everyone at top colleges are decent at reading comprehension so they must have used some quant/logic test.
I read this a while ago and here are some limitations of this study:
Apparently the study is done by using "online games" that supposedly test for cognitive abilities. I choose to take that with a grain of salt.
The study is based on voluntary participation. This is likely to have biases since certain types of students at particular schools might have personalities that lead them to take this exam.
They select college students by the students' use of university email addresses and/or IP addresses. My theory on Princeton's low ranking is that since it has a very small grad school (in which students have similar IP addresses and .edu email addresses), its sample size was not only small but also didn't contain many (if any) graduate students. And as far as I know, graduate students at these top schools are quite smart. From my personal experience, the smartest kids from the most difficult departments at target schools usually don't go into industry; they get a Ph.D. Also the volunteers could have been professors with .edu email addresses so who knows how that would have skewed this study.
^HAH I COULD SEE HOW MIT KIDS WOULD JIZZ ALL OVER ONLINE GAMES!
Haha that's what I wanted to say except didn't want to offend anyone :P
Lol seriously tho. I have a handful of friends going/wanted to go to MIT. One of them goes crazy when it comes to game. Well he ended up going to Stanford so good for him to get out of that MIT stigma that would fit right onto people's judgment of him.
Wash U killing it
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