Does your school make the cut? Sam Greenwood/Getty Images If you want to be surrounded by some of the smartest students in the US and get the most bang for your buck, you may want to consider one of the following universities.

From our recent list of the smartest colleges in America, we pulled out the top public schools.

These colleges offer brainpower and affordability, since the average annual cost of attending an in-state four-year public school is $9,100, according to CollegeBoard. Compare that to the average private school cost of $31,200 — a difference of $22,100 a year.

In order to determine a school's overall smarts, Jonathan Wai, a Duke University Talent Identification Program research scientist, analyzed the average standardized test scores that schools report to US News. (Those that did not report scores are not included.)

These tests are often criticized, but research shows that both the SAT and ACT are good measures of general cognitive ability, since just about any mental test measures one's ability to reason.

ACT scores were converted to SAT scores (math + verbal) using this concordance table so all schools could be compared on one metric. Then, an average of the 25th and 75th percentile was computed (see more detail on methods and limitations here).

On the following ranking, a (2) next to the school's name indicates that some or all students aren't required to supply scores; a (3) indicates that the school did not supply all students it has scores for, or did not tell U.S. News if it had; a (4) indicates that the data is from a previous year, rather than from the most recent year; and a (9) indicates that the school may not require scores from all applicants and that it may not have submitted data for all students.

Here are the smartest public colleges in America: