Miscellaneous

Law School Rankings - 2008 Z-Scores

By Bill Gratsch

For anyone interested in the topic of annual law school rankings, Professor Tom Bell recently posted the 2008 edition of his z-scores via this post, Z-Scores in Model of 2009 USN&WR Law School Rankings, at MoneyLaw. 

U.S. News & World Report publishes scores for each of the hundred or so schools that it ranks highest, and offers some of the data that goes into calculating those scores. To really understand how each of those schools fared relative to its peers, however, you need to know its z-score in each category of data that USN&WR measures. My model of the rankings aims to recreate those z-scores, and thus the rankings themselves, by duplicating both the data and the methodology that USN&WR uses.

As I did in 2005, 2006, and 2007, I here offer the z-scores used in my model of the USN&WR law school rankings. (Please see those earlier posts for fuller explanations of z-scores and why they matter).

Professor Bell has some interesting observations in his various posts on the subject, including:

Unsurprisingly, you'll find the largest numbers in the upper, left-hand corner of the chart. There lie the most heavily-weighted z-scores of the law schools that scored the highest in USN&WR's rankings. Consider, for instance, the .70 weighted z-scores enjoyed by Yale and Harvard under the "reputation among legal academics" category; those numbers nearly swamp the effect of other measures of those schools' performances, and have twice the impact of the peer reputation scores of schools ranked as close as 20th from the top.

This presentation of the data shows how very little influence many of the things that USN&WR measures have on its rankings. The weighted z-scores for Bar pass rates, for instance, vary between only .05 and -.03, with a whole lot of zeros filling that span. Bar passage rates evidently do not matter much to any school's USN&WR score.

To see his full rankings, observations and more, just click here Z-Scores in Model of 2009 USN&WR Law School Rankings.

Full post as published by Blawgs Blog by Bill Gratsch on September 09, 2008 (boomark / email).