U.S. News & World Report tallied the results of 2,730 annual surveys of college presidents, deans and admissions directors (a response rate of 65 percent). The experts were asked to rank all the schools in the same category as their own institutions, placing each school into quartiles based upon its reputation. Each time a school was placed in the top quartile, it received four points; in the second quartile, three points, etc. A school's total points were then divided by the number of survey participants. The resulting reputational rankings were combined with educational data provided by the colleges themselves that dealt with the following measures of academic quality: student selectivity, faculty resources, financial resources, retention rate, "value added," and alumni giving. For the first time, the magazine factored into the rankings the educational value a school adds between freshman orientation and graduation. The measure focuses on the difference between a school's predicted graduation rate, based on the median entrance exam scores of a school's entering students and its educational expenditures per student, and its graduation rate.