Law School Rankings Methodology

I assume that the people lamenting the US News' meager weight given to the bar passage rate have not attended or read much about law school.

First: Law school does very, very little to prepare you for the bar, so a school's bar passage rate does little to measure anything about the school. The only indication is how well the students graduating from a school study for the exam.

Second: Even if bar passage was an adequate measure of the school's success at teaching the law, the bar is different for each state. Some states have tremendously difficult exams while some have much easier ones. You might argue that the differential between the average state bar passage rate and that school's bar passage rate could be an adequate measure, but any statistician will tell you that this is woefully misguided. The samples of lawyers in each state would have to be assumed equal, and this is clearly not the case. The lawyers that practice in New York for example are more likely to have graduated from a top school than say the lawyers in Wyoming.

Daniel of GA 4:28PM April 06, 2010

One really has to question the methodology of US News' Law School ratings. Think about this anomaly.

12.5% of the score relates to the LSAT scores of the students. 10% of the score relates to the students "undergraduate" scores. So 22.5% of the scoring has nothing to do with anything that happened in law school. The students achieved their undergraduate GPAs and LSAT scores before stepping foot in the law school.

The ratings give a 2% weight to bar passage rate --- which is something that presumably the school had major in put in.

The purpose of law school is presumably, to a large extent, to make lawyers. So how is it that the one score that actually has some correlation to whether the law school achieved its goals gets 2% weighting, whereas 22.5% weight is given to the students achievement before they stepped into the school?

All this methodology does is influence schools to deny admission to low LSAT and GPA students, just so the school doesn't sink in the ratings.

Andre Hassid of CA 12:16PM February 10, 2010

US News ranking system is a perpetual feedback system, where high input contributes to high output, which gets fed right back into the input and this cycle continues indefinitely... thus, the rankings are eternally skewed.

consider this parallel;

US News rankings is like the Federal Reserve... they print currency and whatever value they put on the paper (input) is what value that paper will have (output); and since they don't have their money backed with gold, they can keep printing more (input) and the currency is thus inflated (harvard, yale, berkeley keeps staying in the top)...

the top 20 is definitely inflated... full of hot air and BS...

paul of CA 5:34AM November 16, 2009

..is nothing but a self fulfilling prophecy.

It is obvious that that most notorious schools will rank highly again and again - regardless of the actual quality of lawyers they produce.

Also - it's high time that the rankings reflect the difficulty of study - or in more laymen terms - the grading curve.

Just one look at NYU Law's grading curve will explain why 57% of graduates graduate with a gpa of 3.4 or higher - it's required.

Columbia for example, requires that 30-33% receive grades higher than B+.

A look at the 'lower ranked schools' will show you that the grading curves require class averages at the 2.75 area..

This is an important factor for those selecting a school - knowing that even those who receive a B+ score on the final (and only) exam of the semester are likely to take home a B- grade.. (W/O mentioning the school, in one class I received 92 on the only exam for the semester and took home a B) - anyway - just for that reason - it's better to try to get accepted to the higher ranked schools since they are very generous with their grading.

Rankings Critic of NY 6:47AM August 28, 2009