HUNTSVILLE, Alabama -- The 2010 biology department shootings helped put the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) on top of a national website's ranking of "America's 25 Most Crime-Rattled Colleges." The unofficial ranking, based on an analysis of crime reports, was released today by the website "The Daily Beast."

UAH spokesman Ray Garner called the ranking skewed. "It is no secret that we had a tragic shooting incident on our campus in 2010, and that event heavily skewed this ranking," Garner said in a statement today. "If you look at our overall crime statistics, you will find outside that isolated event that our university offers a safe environment for the thousands of students, faculty and staff that travel around our campus."

The website said it based its rankings on a system it designed to compare and rank per-capita crime in certain categories as reported by colleges to the U.S. Department of Education. The reporting period was 2008-2010, which included the period of a triple homicide committed during a biology faculty meeting on the UAH campus. A former assistant biology professor, Dr. Amy Bishop, faces trial this fall on those charges.

"The crimes we considered were: murder, negligent murder, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, car theft, and arson," the website explained. "Because not all crimes are the same, we devised a subjective weighting system based on crime severity. Burglary established our low-end baseline for weighting; car theft was weighted twice as much as burglary; assault and robbery, six times as much as burglary; arson and negligent manslaughter, 10 times as much as burglary; and murder, 20 times as much as burglary." Each campus was also compared based on enrollment.

According to the website, UAH had the following numbers of crimes during the 2008-2010 period surveyed: 3 homicides, 4 robberies, 10 aggravated assaults, 80 burglaries and 8 car thefts.

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UAH is nation's most 'crime-rattled' college, according to website