The Wall Street Journal reported last spring that schools across the country have been altering the SAT and ACT scores that appear in college guides and handbooks.

College officials apparently try to make their schools look more prestigious in the fierce competition for the top students.

Schools like Harvard University, Boston University and New York University, under pressure to attract students, were accused of lying about the figures they submit each year for rankings put together by guides and magazines such as U. S. News & World Report, Money and Barron’s.

Iowa State’s reporting record, however, is apparently clean.

ISU reported scores to Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges, The 1995 College Handbook and was listed in the U.S. News survey. The university also reports scores to Moody’s Investors Service and Standard and Poor’s Corporation for bonding reasons.

“This is really an interesting issue. We’ve been working on it for several years to try and avoid the kinds of problems that have recently been pointed out at other schools,” said Betty Stanley, who is in charge of institution research at ISU and has done a report for the state Board of Regents on the issue.

Stanley said ISU has a good track record in this area and hopes to keep it that way.

“We found ISU to be totally correct, and we’re very pleased with that because we’ve worked hard to keep everyone coordinated so it works out well,” she said.

ISU may be on the up and up, but the Journal found discrepancies with other institutions by comparing the numbers in guides, which are self-reported by the universities, against the numbers given to debt-rating services such as Moody’s Investors Service and Standard and Poor’s Corporation.

While some of the discrepancies resulted from untruthful practices by the university, some of the universities scrutinized said the errors were a result of miscommunication.

The New College of the University of South Florida, which was ranked the No. 1 school in the nation by Money magazine in 1994, reported that its freshman class average SAT score was 1296.

But that score was obtained by cutting off the bottom 6 percent of students, raising the average 40 points.

Admissions Director David Anderson reportedly said the practice, since stopped, was part of the school’s marketing strategy.

Excluding certain groups of low-scoring students from SAT numbers is one of the most common frauds, even though most guidebooks specifically prohibit it, the Journal reported. And although the guidebooks prohibit altering the scores, they have no way of punishing those schools that do.

But some schools say confusion and miscommunication is the reason for discrepancies.

For example, the Journal reported that NYU, in responding to the U. S. News survey, excluded the SAT scores of about 100 poor students in a special state-sponsored program. But an NYU administrator said the magazine asked for SAT scores for students entering in the fall, not just for freshman scores. The 100 excluded students began classes in the summer.

Other practices include excluding international and remedial students’ scores, even though surveys done by magazines and guidebooks say not to.

Along with different methodologies of reporting, Stanley said another problem is the guides contact people in different offices, so people who don’t know the correct numbers may be giving wrong information.

“I don’t think colleges are trying to be deliberately dishonest, maybe a few are, but overall, not really. It’s usually just a case of confusion on the part of some people,” she said.

In addition to standardizing the reporting system, each college needs to appoint one office to report ACT and SAT numbers so there are no mix-ups, Stanley said.

“We’re very proud of the hard work at ISU to get this right,” she said. “We need to keep working hard to get all of this correct, because we’ve all just seen the problems that can happen when you don’t.”