Legal Commentary

The front page of today's WSJ has an article about a possible change in the U.S. News law school ranking formula.  The change, which has already been much discussed, might require law schools to count the LSAT scores and GPA of part-time students in schools' overall LSAT and GPA numbers. 

I'm sure others will have more to say about this than me.  I just want to draw your attention to one curious sentence in the article: "Mr. Morse of U.S. News says the magazine will run tests of how the change would play out in rankings, and then decide in January."  Now, the sentence does not precisely say that the U.S. News formula decision will depend on "how the change would play out in rankings," but it sure seems to imply it.  Otherwise, why are they running the tests?

Presumably, U.S. News wants to be sure that such a change in methodology would not make the rankings seem less legitimate.  But if there is some gold standard that U.S. News uses to see how well its tests come out, then just show us the gold standard law school rankings!  Perhaps there is some other explanation.  Perhaps one can test the "stability" of the rankings or some other set of criteria that are neutral with respect to the rankings of particular schools.  But, it will not be shocking to suggest that the primary impetus for the testing may have more to do with the business goals of U.S. News rather than the development of an unbiased, careful approach to measuring law school quality.