The 600 Smartest Colleges In America

Schools are constantly being ranked on everything from student happiness, campus beauty, success of alums, and professor prestige. But where should you go if you want to be among the most intelligent students in America?

Exclusively for Business Insider, Jonathan Wai, a Duke University Talent Identification Program researcher, calculated a ranking of America's colleges and universities based purely on smarts, as reflected by the school's average scores on standardized tests.

These tests are often criticized, but research shows that both the SAT and ACT are good measures of general cognitive ability; and the average scores that schools report to U.S. News gives a reasonable snapshot of the brainpower level of that school.

We updated our ranking from last year by including all the schools in the national university, liberal arts college, regional university, and regional college lists that reported SAT or ACT scores in the latest U.S. News ranking.

ACT scores were translated into SAT scores (math + verbal) using this concordance table so that all schools could be compared using one metric. Finally, an average of the 25th and 75th percentile was computed (see a full description of the methodology and limitations here). This resulted in a total of 1,339 schools analyzed, from which we pulled the top 600.

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