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U.S. News has removed George Washington University from its influential college rankings after learning that the school submitted inflated figures. This isn't the first time this year a school has been caught sneaking doctored stats past U.S. News' fact-checking operation, but it is the first time one was unranked as a result.

George Washington University committed the sin of over-reporting the number of incoming freshmen coming from the top 10 percent of their respective high school classes. Instead of 78 percent, only 58 percent had an elite spot in their high schools' top decile. Administrators had inflated those numbers for over a decade. U.S. News has responded by stripping GW of its No. 51 rank and tossing it into the "unranked" section, the heap in which it piles all those schools it doesn't even bother to crunch numbers for. "This Unranked status will last until next fall's publication of the 2014 edition of the Best Colleges rankings, and until George Washington confirms the accuracy of the school's next data submission in accordance with U.S. News's requirements," writes U.S. News's director of data research Bob Morse.

Don't start shouting "scandalous!" just yet, though. Universities have been caught submitting fudged numbers quite often. This year alone, Emory University admitted to sending in doctored test scores, and an internal probe revealed that Claremont McKenna College had been up to the same shenanigans for the past six years. Neither were relegated to the unranked category, though. Perhaps schools keep lying about their statistics because it's so easy to do. The Best Colleges report might be the high school overachiever's bible, but critics doubt the soundness of its methodology. "Honestly, it’s just a list put together by magazine editors. The whole exercise is a little silly," The New York Times' Joe Nocera recently wrote. "Universities that want to game the rankings can easily do so."