New Contest: Ask Dartmouth

The latest post at Ask Dartmouth serves up a vertiable verbal tango to dance around a rather innocuous answer to a straight-forward question. The inquistor asks, “What percentage of this year’s graduating class is headed to medical schools?” The logical response would have been in the form: “##.#%” end of story. Instead, we get:

According to statistics from Dartmouth’s Career Services office, there were 82 members of the Class of 2007 who applied to medical schools; 70 of them (85%) were accepted. Over the past five years, an average of 65 members of the graduating class have applied to medical schools, with an average acceptance rate of 86 percent. Presently at Dartmouth Medical School are 45 students who received bachelor’s degrees from the College, representing 14 percent of the Med School’s student body.

I couldn’t help but marvel at how A.D. managed to do everything except answer the question which had been asked.

For those of you keeping score at home, the correct response would have been in the neighborhood of 7% (based on around 990 students graduating). Your guess is as good as mine as to why this simple fact was excluded.

So here’s a contest for Monday morning: What’s your favorite Ask Dartmouth non-response? The submitter of the best one will win some nominal prize TBD.

UPDATE: The offending post seems to have been taken down from the site. Will repost with further updates.

UPDATE 2: Here is the original post, for what it’s worth.