Macalester among 20 colleges with the smartest students

How do you figure out which colleges have the smartest students?

Not by comparing standardized test scores, figured one researcher at Luminosity.

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He and his team tested 60,000 students at over 400 colleges and universities to play games that measured various cognitive skills including attention, memory, speed of processing, problem solving, and flexibility.

By that measure, Macalester College placed in the Top 20.

One of the limitations of the study is that Luminosity appears to have tested only students who already were playing its games, and so was not testing students from every Minnesota campus:

"We have the largest database of human cognitive performance, with over 30 million users from around the world who have played our diverse set of engaging cognitive training games over 450 million times. Given the large number of college-age users in the United States on our site, we were interested in whether we could harness our database in order to assess universities ..."

With that in mind, here's who placed where in the overall ranking:

18. Macalester College

43. St. Olaf College

94. University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

117. Concordia College at Moorhead

129. College of St. Benedict / St. John's University

187. University of St. Thomas

217. Winona State University

277. St. Cloud State University

As usual, rankings are fun but flawed, so take it in with a critical eye.

Here's the original report with additional categories.

Let me know if I've missed anything.