COLORADO, USA — Students at one Colorado university are among the brainiest in the nation -- even more so than Harvard, according to a survey conducted by Lumosity.
Lumosity is an online program that offers games aimed at improving memory, attention and problem solving. It surveyed students across the country to determine which institutions are the brainiest.
Colorado School of Mines finished in fourth place; Harvard was in fifth.
A total of 75,000 college students participated in Lumosity's Fit Test.
The games focused on mental abilities, such as attention, memory, speed and flexibility, according to Luminosity.
“It turns out that performance on these games is strongly correlated with standardized test scores, and many schools at the top of our list won’t surprise you,” said Bob Schafer, the vice president of research at Luminosity. “But there are also a handful of schools that you might not expect. The student bodies of these schools have memory, speed, attention and flexibility skills that make them stand out.”
The study was adjusted for differences in age and gender across different schools and only included users who completed Luminosity’s three-game Fit Test.
Individuals were included in the survey if they used an email address ending in .edu or connected to Luminosity through an IP email address associated with a college or university.
The rankings of institutions were focused on colleges or universities with at least 50 users who met the inclusion criteria. Some high-ranking schools were eliminated from the survey due to failure to meet the criteria.
The study breaks down rankings by game and which part of the cognitive area it focuses on more.
Here are the rankings for the top 25 brainiest colleges:
- Dartmouth College
- Carnegie Mellon University
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Colorado School of Mines
- Harvard University
- Princeton University
- Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
- Vanderbilt University
- California Polytechnic State University
- Washington University in St. Louis
- Stevens Institute of Technology
- University of Notre Dame
- Bucknell University
- Missouri University of Science & Technology
- Stanford University
- Tufts University
- University of Chicago
- Northwestern University
- Creighton University
- Gustavus Adolphus College
- Pacific Lutheran University
- Brigham Young University
- Eckerd College
- Brown University
- Calvin College
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