The "Wall Street Journal" Enters the Law School Rankings Debate
Reader Comments
LSAT, is pointless, and is just another form to rip off students
Quite Frankly, the LSAT has nothing to do with how you will perform in law school. I had a 3.5 in undergrand and am doing quite well in law school now, but did poorely on the LSAT. The LSAT is just another form of revenue making for what is sad to say, the business of law school. Law schools place too much emphasis on the LSAT, and preclude students with good GPA's life experience, work experience, essentially all of the other factors that make a great and diverse student body. Schools that accept the lower LSAT scores, are ranked lower than schools that take the top LSAT scores. What is missing the USNews and other sources in their ranking is what the students bring to the table, how hard they work, and what they make of themselves. The affects of the LSAT place good students in what the US news report classifies as lower tier schools which ultimately affect the kinds of jobs students get after graduation, another factor that goes into the ranking system. In my opinion the LSAT, and ranking system is silly.
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John, Boston
Personally, I think LSAT's and other scores of that ilk are about as meaningless as they come. Why rank what goes into thes school? It would seem to make sense to rank schools based on a comparison of their LSAT scores and the scores on the bar exam after graduation. That way, we know what went in, and what came out. The measure of the school would be the variance based on certain benchmarks.
Otherwise, we are just measuring the popularity of something based on word of mouth, as opposed to real value added stuff. If you changed to that formula or something similar, than I would say you are truly measuring the "quality" of a school.
This is similar to the Harvard problem. Harvard, generally, get the very cream of the crop and you could make a strong argument that the vast majority of Harvard grads would have done quite well in life even without a college degree. So, what does Harvard really do for it's excellent students. Does it in fact make them worse. Would students be better off going to OSU since the differential between their incoming freshmen and outgoing senior is the highest. Would this education system in fact more greatly benefit higher quality students?
Much ado about nothing
It's a good thing that Mr. Morse and USNWR is open to making the rankings "better," however I think the part-time issue is much ado about nothing. As the article and Mr. Morse admit, the FT/PT differential in LSAT and GPA is very small which doesn't support the claims that gaming (in this very specific way) is widespread. Not to mention that most schools do not offer part-time programs, anyway. (Many schools report a small number of "part time" students, but these are FT students taking a PT course load and does not mean the school has a formal PT program.)
If USNWR was REALLY serious about making its rankings better it would lessen the weight of the reputation scores. The idea that a VERY small subsection of lawyers (2 attorneys each at a select group of large corporate firms) and judges (federal appellate judges), each being groups that are historically VERY snobbish when it comes to opinions about what constitutes a "good" law school, could rank all 200+ law schools in any meaningful way is just ridiculous. It isn't rocket science to figure out that Hiring Partner at NYC BigLaw who works 60+ hour weeks and has never set foot in a "flyover state" has no rational basis upon which to rank Fordham or Boston College relative to Iowa or Minnesota, much less Syracuse to a Willamette or UNLV.
(Not to mention the scandalously low response rate to the surveys, I don't care if the statisticians think the sample size is big enough).
With the ease of online surveys, why not make it wide open to thousands of firms? More data is better, no? Do we really think that Hiring Partner at BigLaw can be trusted not to rate up his/her own alma mater more than Solo Practitioner in Salina, KA? Or what about just adding some City/County Prosecutor or Public Defender Offices to the Lawyer survey pool and some trial court judges to the judge pool? I know that all the hype used to sell magazines is geared to "T14", type-A, wannabe law review types who buy into all that stuff, but the fact is that the vast majority of law students (read: market segment) will NOT be practicing complex corporate law for AMLAW 100 firms.
Unequivocal Ranking
The current ranking criterea does not fairly account for students that bring more to the table than just good LSAT/GPA's. That is one of the fundamental problems with rankings.
Faults aside, the ranking system has been selected according to a certain set of criterea. Omitting a chunk of students from the analysis paints an innaccurate picture of the school. Part-time students make up a portion of the school rankings through bar-passage rates and post-graduation employment. So why should they be omitted from the admission profile of a school? The current exclusion is arbitrary and inaccurate.
All law students face the challenge of being summed up by two scores, LSAT and GPA. That is something that ranking systems should address, but not through omission of a section of the student body. Minorities and those with socioeconomic and educational disadvantages face a similar hurdle, and as such many schools have chosen to loosen their admission standards. Now law schools will have the same choice to make with other non-traditional students.
Target the gamers, not the PT system
The schools that are blatant about gaming through part-time programs should be penalized, but there are better ways of doing that statistically than through merging the full-time and part-time scores. If a large percentage of students can transfer from part-time to full-time after only one or two semesters, it's clearly a gaming device.
However, the idea that part-time programs are a back-door for non-traditional students is unfair. By definition, most non-traditional students work full-time or have family obligations, and a part-time program may be the only way to make a law school education financially possible. Many have graduate degrees in other fields and years of professional achievement in other fields, but those factors can't be easily quantified into a tidy statistic for U.S. News surveys. If their median LSAT and UGPAs pull down the overall statistics of a school by only a point or a fraction of a percent, does that mean that the school is trying to game the system? Likewise, should such a minute difference in entering student statistics really make the difference of a full tier in the rankings, over factors that measure the quality of an academic program or the success of a school's graduates?
Kudos to U.S. News
This seems like a terrific move by U.S. News. They are listening to critics of their methodology, studying it carefully, and considering appropriate adjustments.
There is no doubt that some schools have shifted significant numbers of students, who would prefer to be full-time, into the part-time program, and then allow them to transfer into full-time after the first year -- a clear attempt to "game" the U.S. News rankings. No doubt, the unintended consequences on legitimate part-time programs, allowing nontraditional students to attend while continuing to work, must be taken into account. But Bob Morse and U.S. News are to be commended for carefully considering such a step.
Rankings should take into account part-time programs
It makes no sense to rank schools by only a portion of their student population. Precluding non-traditional students from a back-door entrance into a school is not a factor that should dictate ranking criterea. Likewise, it is important to attract minority students to law schools. Should USNews stop including minority applicants in their rankings too? Excluding part-time students from USNews rankings undermines the objectivity and misrepresents school statistics. If different criterea is more important for law school rankings than what is selected by USNews than one should look to a different ranking system, like Thomas M. Cooley's "Judging the Law Schools".
