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Academic

: The Faculty Lounge

Alternatives to US News' Law School Rankings Keep Proliferating

By Alfred Brophy

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Well, the alternatives to US News keep proliferating. Yesterday we had Dan Filler's post on Judge Pollak's most recent rankings in the Drexel Law Review. Some years ago J. Gordon Hylton assembled the "US News without the Clutter" rankings (and more here). The Hylton rankings looked at two key issues: LSAT scores of entering students and peer assessment rankings. This year, Nathan Gimpel has assembled a similar set, though he casts his net a little more broadly. They are styled the "Helmholtz Rankings" . These are similar, but have a few more factors: they take into consideration peer and lawyer/judge assessment scores from 2009, as well as 2010, as well (a very little bit) student numbers from last year, too.

These are similar to the rankings Brian Leiter linked to yesterday at Light and Liberty (also know as the "53% Ranking"). One major difference, though between the Helmholtz rankings and the Light and Liberty ranking is that the later did not take account of gpa. At this point I should say something about the unfair singling out of the University of Alabama (which was ranked 30 by US News) by Light and Liberty. Among Light and Liberty's charges are that Alabama is admitting high-ranking students from the UA Honors College without requiring them to take the LSAT. I've known a lot of people who graduated from the Alabama Honors' College over many years and to a person they're outstanding. As I said in a post earlier this week, whatever the impetus behind the admissions of people with astronomical gpas without requiring the LSAT is, it's unlikely to be designed to "hide" poor LSAT performances.

Here is the formula used for the Helmholtz Rankings:

34% - 2010 Peer Assessment Scores

17% - 2010 Lawyer/Judge Assessment Scores

10.625% - 2010 25th Percentile LSAT

10.625% - 2010 75th Percentile LSAT

6.375% - 2010 25th Percentile GPA

6.375% - 2010 75th Percentile GPA

6% - 2009 Peer Assessment Scores

3% - 2009 Lawyer/Judge Assessment Scores

1.875% - 2009 25th Percentile LSAT

1.875% - 2009 75th Percentile LSAT

1.125% - 2009 25th Percentile GPA

1.125% - 2009 75th Percentile GPA

One question that these different rankings pose is: will this begin to break down the power of US News? There are now enough alternative rankings--some of which draw on some of US News' underlying data, of course--that we may see some real competition. For a while I thought the Hylton Rankings were making some traction; perhaps Helmholtz will be the new Hylton Rankings (or maybe the 53% Ranking will become dominant). This is hard to know.

I continue to think that rankings could usefully mine the citation data to schools' law reviews. As I describe here, the citation data provides an objective (even if suspect) measure of the intellectual life at a law school.

In addition to the link above, here's a permanent link to the rankings on the faculty lounge's website. (I learned my lesson after a link I had this weekend switched over from a scan of the US News rankings to Kermit the Frog.)

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on April 24, 2009 (boomark / email).