The cynic in me says just the opposite. Law schools with high admission rates already ignore test scores for high GPA’s. It’s the highly selective schools that will use LSAT-TO for students that they really want to recruit. They could accept another test instead, such as GRE or GMAT.
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Maybe. But if the school doesn’t care about the rankings, then there’s no risk anymore reporting lower average test scores (or not reporting test score range at all).
Many law schools already accept GRE.
I think law schools including Yale absolutely care about their ranking. A lower USNWR ranking can have severe negative consequences for the school. However, that does not mean they are happy with USNWR’s ranking system or happy with needing to do things like keep LSAT scores as high as possible to maintain ranking. As noted in my earlier post, I suspect that Yale will continue to be ranked #1 by USNWR, so they have less to lose by not participating in the survey or speaking out against USNWR than most other law schools.
It’s more than just “many” law schools. The majority of ABA accredited law schools accept GRE. The current ABA accreditation requirements state,
"A law school shall require each applicant for admission as a first year J.D. student to take a valid and reliable admission test
…
Interpretation 503-1
A law school that uses an admission test other than the Law School Admission Test sponsored by the Law School Admission Council shall establish that such other test is a valid and reliable test to assist the school in assessing an applicant’s capability to satisfactorily complete the school’s educational program. "
Each applicant is required to take an admission test, but that test does not have to be LSAT. GRE is permitted, so long as law schools can adequately show it is “valid and reliable”, which apparently law schools have done.
I doubt if any any selective law school would go TO. Students who cannot perform well on standardized tests will struggle with bar exams. The multi state portion is a 200 question timed multiple choice test that requires a combination of reading comprehension and knowledge of law. On the other hand, you don’t need to be a “170” level LSAT scorer to pass the bar or be a valuable contributor in a law school community. For me, diversity of background and experience, was especially valuable in law school as classroom discussion was a critical component of legal education.
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Yale, and now a handful of additional law schools, have said they won’t participate in the rankings, e.g. give proprietary data to USNWR.
USNWR has said they will continue to include these schools in the rankings using publicly available data, but haven’t addressed how they will do that if the schools don’t make the various ranking components public. This may or may not include info like test scores, GPA, acceptance rate, student /faculty ratio, etc.
We don’t know how USNWR will calculate rank without all the component data, but at some point the lack of data could impact a school’s rank, or even lead USNWR to not rank the school. There’s precedent to not rank schools who don’t participate in the undergrad rankings.
There is still plenty of room for increase, since LSAC recalculates college GPAs with A+ = 4.33.
Severe negative consequences? If Yale drops to #3 or #5 it will not have a bit of impact on the university. Its bond ratings won’t change; its endowment won’t collapse; its fundraising won’t change; it won’t find faculty fleeing en masse; it won’t even impact Yale’s placement of clerks in the Federal judiciary (including the Supreme Court). There is an entire generation of judges who want to hire Yale clerks, and that’s not going away because of some magazine. There is an entire infrastructure of judges, current clerks and former clerks in the federal appellate system who have Yale ties. They don’t lose sleep over ratings. Amy Comey Barrett was “a story” for many reasons (gender, mother, etc.) but her “non Ivy” education was part of the buzz as well.
Dips in the ratings impact schools in the 50-100 range. They want to attract star faculty but don’t always have the resources to compete; they want to improve the competitiveness of the student body in getting offers from highly desirable employers; they want to identify their most successful alums to “give back” by showing them that the value of their law degree has increased over time.
Yale? Won’t give a hoot if they get downgraded.
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“…top law schools may end up depending more on college reputations and admitting more T20 undergrads” Yes, that goes against the spirit of the holistic evaluation process and undermines the key argument why going test optional is more fair.
Yes, we don’t know what will happen, so there is a lot of speculation. In other USNWR ranking lists, when schools don’t answer they survey, USNWR uses a combination of publicly available information such as federal reporting and numbers the college submitted in previous years, when available. I expect this will happen with the law schools that don’t answer the survey.
If a single mid ranked law school, such as #98 = St. Louis, said they won’t participate; I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more negative consequences for that college. USNWR might apply a penalty to the college, or if they really wanted to send a message to other law schools, list them as unranked. Doing so is unlikely to have much influence on the sales or profitability of USNWR.
However, Yale is a different story. I believe Yale has been ranked #1 on USNWR ranking in every list since its inception decades ago. A large portion of USNWR readers expect to see Yale as #1 and believe it is the #1 law school. If USNWR goes against this expectation and makes Yale rank lower, it makes the USNWR ranking list seem wrong to many readers, and makes many readers question the validity of the USNWR formula in general. This leads to reduced sales and profitability for the company.
As noted in previous posts, I don’t believe Yale’s ranking will change. However, a change from #1 to #5 will absolutely have negative consequences for the university, which some would call “severe.” Several studies have shown that this degree of change in USNWR is associated with a noteworthy decrease in applications. Some desirable students are likely to choose #1 Harvard over #5 Yale, who wouldn’t in previous years. There is likely to be an impact on alumni donations and complaints from alumni. There are numerous other areas that are likely to be influenced.
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I think it depends on the school. For undergrad, Princeton ranks #1 in USNWR, but I heard loses to HYSM in terms of cross-admit rates. Students have different perceptions than what the magazine is telling them.
I am not saying the #1 ranked college wins the most cross admits. I am saying a change from #1 to #5 impacts the college, including impacts the yield of cross admits. If Princeton dropped from #1 to #5 next year, I expect it would impact the yield of cross admits.
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Anyone who thinks there’s a meaningful difference between #1 and #5 to the extent it would impact their application or enrollment decision has the wrong approach in my opinion.
It’s not as if the USNWR ratings are scientific. If you’re choosing between the top 5 colleges you really should focus on fit.
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Yale is much smaller than its “peer” law schools. The drop in applications, cross admits, etc. given the relative sizes of the schools would need to be HUGE (not Yale dropping to #5-- but dropping to #25. It has its own pedagogy, it is proud that it does not “prepare” students to take the bar, and as I’ve previously noted, despite a smaller group of living alums than Harvard and Stanford (just given the size of its L3 class) punches above its weight across the top tier of the legal profession.
I think you are vastly overestimating the impact on Yale even if it dropped to #5.
For decades, Yale’s Business School was significantly lower rated than what it believed to be its peer schools. (USNWR disagreed). It caused some teeth-gnashing among the B-school administration (and let to a renaming of the program, rebranding of the entire school) but it was truly “inside baseball”. The university as a whole pretty much left the teeth-gnashing to the Deans who ran admissions, career services, etc. and its impact on the university as a whole- a nothing-burger. No problems recruiting star faculty, no problems in fundraising, no impact on the U’s ability to borrow.
It has since bounced around a bit in the ratings-- but again, nobody cares except a couple of people who get paid to care. And I cannot imagine the Law School (with a MUCH more influential alumni community) is going to care either.
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One can debate about specific degree of negative influence Yale would see if their ranking dropped from #1 to #n, but there will be a negative influence. Yale and other law schools care about their USNWR ranking and will see negative consequences, if their ranking drops. A study that interviews law school deans and discusses their feelings about USNWR ranking is at https://www.lawschooltransparency.com/documents/cites/fearfailing_lsac_2007.pdf . Example quotes from some law school deans are below:
As a dean of a law school that one year fell several spots in the first tier explained: I had alumni writing me left and right, I had my board of directors asking me what had suddenly happened that [our school] had suddenly … it was an irrational response because the people writing mostly actually knew about the school. I had my student body protesting, and they’re here and they know in the course of one year that nothing had happened. But they all essentially were saying, “What did you do?”
experienced a drop of two positions, and the Dean really kind of went into overdrive to send out letters to alumni and in their alumni magazine to make a very elaborate explanation of that. And you say, “Why would anybody care? It doesn’t mean a thing. It’s just one of those minor statistical variations that is always going to occur from time to time.” But that sort of tiny little change was seen as very threatening to the school and really required some sort of emergency program to combat it.
Now the law school faculties and the smart administrators all say, “[The rankings are] a bunch of hooey, we don’t care about this,” until they drop and the board of trustees says, “Hey you’re dropping; why should we give you more money?” And the board of visitors from the law school say, “Man, your school’s really going to pot and you haven’t changed a thing. … Big changes need to be made here.” And your monetary support—the alumni—say, “Well I’m not sure I want to support a school that’s going in the wrong direction.” And your money starts to dry up, and you go, “We have got to have the money; we can’t afford to lose funding or else it will spiral downhill and we will be a worse law school."
Thanks for posting.
I don’t have time to locate all of these quotations- are these from top 5 institutions? I’d be curious to know (generally) if this is how the Deans of Harvard, Yale and Stanford law schools think, or if this reflects the thinking at Duke, UVA, etc.
I think you’d have a more compelling argument if the study interviewed some of the “feeder judges” at the federal level… how THEY feel about hiring clerks from a law school that dropped two or three places. And my guess is- they’d feel nothing. The feeder judges know what their dockets look like and who they want in their chambers. And they know what the SCOTUS judges are looking for in THEIR clerks, and they know who is a future Solicitor General or US Attorney. And none of these folks care about USNWR.
There is “chatter” among law students about why Northwestern, Duke, Michigan (in the T-14) don’t do as well in the clerkship sweepstakes as their peer institutions. Chicken, egg, who knows (and the general public says “who cares”). But it takes a generation for the top of the legal profession to turn over and therefore- the annual gyrations of a magazine rankings aren’t going to have much impact on the top tier!
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They interview persons from a wide variety of law schools, of all tiers. The study mentions that 5 of the top 10 USNWR law schools were included. The comments are meant to be anonymous, so they don’t identify which law school made the quoted comment. They do say things like “first tier”, as occurs in the previously quoted comment by a dean who “fell several spots in the first tier,”
Among all of the scores of law schools they interview, only 2 say they are largely unaffected by USNWR ranking. Those 2 “were deans at schools who were entrenched in lower tiers and who received little pressure from their constituents; in one case, this was due to geographical isolation, and in the other it was because of its distinctive mission”
Northwestern has announced that it will no longer participate in the US News rankings. How long is the list now?
I believe it is up to 8 of the 14 “first tier” law schools, as summarized below:
November 16, 2022:
#1 Ranked Yale Law School
#4 Ranked Harvard Law School
November 17, 2022:
#9 Ranked University of California, Berkeley School of Law
November 18, 2022:
#2 Ranked Stanford Law School
#4 Ranked Columbia Law School
#14 Ranked Georgetown University Law Center
November 20, 2022
#10 Ranked University of Michigan Law School
November 21, 2022
#13 Ranked Northwestern Pritzker School of Law
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I don’t understand. Why is this change unique to law schools? These 8 law schools belong to universities with similarly top ranked business schools, medical schools, and undergraduate colleges. Why aren’t they also following suit?