Tony Fiorini/Yale University/Facebook Harvard and Yale tie for No. 1.
We recently ranked the smartest colleges in America, and Ivy League schools were featured prominently at the top of the list, with four breaking into the overall top 10.
We decided to see how these storied institutions stack up against each other. It turns out Harvard and Yale tie for No. 1.
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 the schools report to US News.
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).
Here are America's Ivy League schools ranked by student brainpower:
| Smarts Rank | Overall Smarts Rank | School | Average SAT |
| 1 | 3 | Harvard University | 1505 |
| 1 | 3 | Yale University | 1505 |
| 3 | 5 | Princeton University | 1500 |
| 4 | 8 | Columbia University | 1480 |
| 5 | 17 | Dartmouth College | 1455 |
| 5 | 17 | University of Pennsylvania | 1455 |
| 7 | 24 | Brown University | 1440 |
| 8 | 28 | Cornell University | 1420 |