Most Strongly Supported LSAT Blogs

US News and World Report, of all things, has a piece today that essentially brings the hammer down on people applying to law school.

In the article, the author, Katy Hopkins, implies that it’s a baffling situation that students, in the present law school and legal environment, choose higher ranked schools with limited or no scholarships over full tuition scholarships at lower ranked schools.
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Our long national nightmare may soon be over.

The National Law Journal reported on Monday that SALT (not just a garden-variety spice, or a Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty, or an anagram of LSAT, but the Society of American Law Teachers) has recommended that law schools stop submitting LSAT information of incoming students to US News and World Report magazine (in a sense, “starving” the US News of information).
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I managed to sprain/break my ankle last week while lightly jogging to my car. I’ve been claiming I fell on a curb, but really, it was just a slight incline (hey, it was dark!). I then fainted, like a lady in Victorian England wearing a corset too tightly. I say “sprain/break” because my ankle a) is still swollen and slightly disjointed to one side, and b) could be either sprained or broken and I have yet to see a doctor about this, and probably will not for at least two more weeks.
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It’s not a secret that we are not the biggest fans of the US News Rankings here at MSS. Trent has had multiple postings on the subject of the rankings and there’s no real reason to delve back into it except to say that the rankings themselves may or may not be an insidious plot by a evil mastermind living in a volcano.
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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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