Very interesting criticism/debunking of US News Law Rankings

Graduate School Law School
1

<p><a href="http://www.leiterrankings.com/usnews/guide.shtml%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.leiterrankings.com/usnews/guide.shtml&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

2

<p>This is old news, and Leiter's system has also been rejected:
<a href="http://www.*********.com/leiter.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.*********.com/leiter.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

3

<p>Sorry:</p>

<p><a href="http://www.a%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.a&lt;/a> u t o a d m i t .com/leiter.html</p>

<p>Excise the spaces.</p>

4

<p>Hum... has so much potential, but very poorly thought-out.</p>

<p>IMO, US News favours larger schools. Leiter never mentions that academic repuation (among firms and judges) often correlates to size of school (or size of undergrad). Generally, people know larger schools, and are more likely to have encountered a grad of a large school than a small school. So the rankings are skewed that way.</p>

<p>His math is bad. He discussed median LSAT score and said that there is a discrepancy between large schools and small schools. Well, he probably should think through his logic a bit more. A school with 180 students only needs 90 with a high LSAT score... but then again, it can only accept 89 students with low LSAT scores. A 450 person school, on the other hand, can accept 224 students with crummy LSATs (or GPAs) before its median is affected. The size of the application pool probably varies as well... it's not like they both have 5,000 applicants. Sheesh. I hate when non-math people try to evaluate statistics.</p>

<p>I don't think that Leiter gave enough attention to HOW schools can manipulate expenditures - and how this manipulation is fundamentally different (and more sinister) from manipulating the numbers of your entering class. Are librarians faculty? Are they faculty if they teach a course? Do you have a low student-faculty ratio, but some of your faculty do nothing but research? Do faculty teach only one course per semester, or do they have some 1L courses and some upper-level courses? IMO, there is something fundamentally different between two schools (let's say 200 students, 5 faculty) where each person teahes one course - for 5 sections with 40 students each - than one in which each faculty member teaches two courses, for ten sections with 20 students each. </p>

<p>Sigh.</p>

5

<p>Hahaha...nspeds, funny link.</p>