Most Strongly Supported LSAT Blogs

As has been discussed ad nauseam, law school rankings can often be inaccurate oversimplifications and generally detrimental for everyone other than US News and World Report shareholders. For a variety of reasons I won’t go into now, USNWR is generally the only one that means anything, but as I’ve mentioned before, you should always do your own research into the schools you want to go to. USNWR isn’t worthless, but it should also by no means be your only tool. Research the individual schools. One easy place to start? More rankings!

In addition to USNWR, there’s Brian Leiter’s rankings, The Princeton Review’s, as well as Vault.com. However, my favorite by far is put out by Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Michigan. Never heard of them? Well you should have, they’re ranked 12th in the nation! And they should know, since they’re the ones doing the rankings. (more…)

It’s no secret that it’s expensive to go to law school. But when a public school (UC Hastings) ranked 39th charges more for tuition than a private school (Stanford) ranked 3rd; something is very, very wrong. We naturally thought the recession was to blame. As state governments slash funding to universities, public schools have to raise tuition to keep their doors open. But it turns out the culprit might be the ranking system, itself.

Here at MSS, it’s no secret that we aren’t too impressed with USNWR and their law school rankings. But what began as a flawed methodology has taken an insidious turn. In this just-released report, the Government Accountability Office places a large portion of the blame for the rising cost of law schools on USNWR, claiming that the competition for schools to increase their ranking is raising the costs for students. (more…)

As everyone knows, US News and World Report already dropped the Fat Man of rankings on us not so long ago, but just this week The Princeton Review (TPR) dropped their Little Boy as well. TPR does their own ranking system, and while it’s much less regarded than US News, there are some pretty interesting tidbits of delicious informational nuggets to be ripped from its moist flesh.

To be totally clear, this really is not a scientific study. It is, however, based on enough hard data and a large enough number of survey respondents to make it safe to assume that it’s not total poppycock, as the kids say. Unlike USNWR, TPR does a bunch of Top 10 Lists in many different categories. I don’t think anyone is surprised by BYU winning the Most Conservative Students race (or by the fact that 6 of the other winners are from the south), or that Yale tops the list of “Toughest To Get Into.” But there were some things that were a bit surprising. (more…)

I was thinking of following Trent’s lead and writing about whatever the hell pops into my mind (number one contender was The Various Firms and Starting Salaries of the Muppets) when I came across this little story this morning. Back in his heyday of being relevant, Trent also wrote about how USNWR can be pretty bullshitty, and today the GW Hatchet reported one instance of how their rankings are actually having a very real and tangible effect.

Most people would agree that George Washington Law is a great school. But how great? In the 2009 USNWR rankings, they dropped from 20th to 28th. An eight-place drop might not matter as much in the third tier or lower, but up at the top it’s pretty huge. According to Senior Associate Dean Greg Maggs: “The thing that I’m worried about most is the current college seniors who are thinking about where to apply. We might be off their radar screen and that might provide a bad year for us this year.” That sucks. Especially because the drop apparently wasn’t due to any change on their part. (more…)

I’m tired of talking about this, so I can only imagine how tired your must be of hearing about it.

In my first post on this subject I argued that the USNWR rankings use LSAT scores in a way that is inappropriately self-reinforcing. In my second post, I argued that the use of lawyers’ and judges’ opinions in the rankings was inappropriate for similar reasons. By the end, I’d concluded that the USNWR rankings were performative, not merely descriptive, in that they heavily influence both law school admissions patterns and hiring practices which are the phenomena they’re purporting to track.

Before we finally put this issue to rest, I thought we should address the appropriate reaction for law school applicants who were persuaded by these arguments. That would be the interesting part, right? (assuming there was one.)

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In my last post

, I bemoaned USNWR’s law school rankings as being performative rather than merely descriptive; that is, I claimed that the rankings create and reinforce a hierarchy of law schools, rather than merely tracking an independently established hierarchy.

I’m going to do more of the same here, but now I want to focus on another of USNWR’s ranking criteria: the opinions of lawyers, hiring partners, and judges. These are especially important, because the opinions of this group constitute one of the most heavily weighed criteria in the rankings.

Using these opinions as criteria appears to be quite sensible because it ensures that law school rankings don’t merely exist in a vacuum, but are instead sensitive to the combined wisdom of professionals who see representatives of these schools on a daily basis. Great, right? It’s good that they sent out all of those polls.

A couple of concerns, though…

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Every year when the U.S. News and World Report (hereafter USNWR) ranking of law schools comes out, I’m annoyed. Not just watered down drink, cold entree, stain on your new shirt annoyed either, but deeply existentially troubled.

Riley just wrote a piece about the USNWR rankings and, in doing so, he brought it all back. And now, I’m suffering again. Allow me to explain why.

First, I’m not casting aspersions on the people who compile this report. I’m sure they’re all intelligent and well-meaning people. (Or not, but either way it has no bearing on my annoyance).

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I was just about to write about something that would be very helpful to all those LSAT students preparing for the big test, but someone at the BP office just dumped the new U.S. News & World Report law school ranking on my desk. And, thus, I have fallen prey to the same mistake that plagues LSAT students. Instead of worrying about why #13 was (D) and why they missed yet another classic example of a composition fallacy, students generally concern themselves with why getting that question wrong will lead to them going to a lower-ranked law school and stymie their chances of ever scoring a high-paying job and good-looking mate. Not a good idea, by the way. Just focus on the test and worry about the other crap later. But I digress.

If you have not heard of the U.S. News rankings, then you must be new to this law school thing or new to this country. They are the most important and influential law school rankings out there. Law schools will tell you that they don’t matter, but they do. It is my belief that the deans of law schools all get together in secret meetings (probably wearing dark robes and carrying staffs) and discuss how to improve their ranking.

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