Academic

Paul Caron Brews Up His Own (Modified) US News Rankings

By Dan Filler

Over at TaxProf Blog, Paul Caron has taken the two components of US News that most folks think have some merit - the peer assessment survey number (reputation among academics) and the lawyer/judge assessment number.   He notes that the overall US News scoring incorporates peer assessment as 25% of the total and lawyer/judge assessment as 15%.   Extrapolating, Paul creates what he titles the 2010 US News Quality Assessment Ratings.  These rankings are based exclusively on survey scores, weighting peer numbers 62.5% and lawyer/judge numbers as 37.5%.  The overall rankings are a tad different than the overall US News numbers.  Some interesting stuff:

Northwestern tumbles from #10 to #15 
North Carolina rockets from #30 to #20 
GW soars from #28 to #21
Wisconsin rises from #35 to #26  
BU sinks from #20 to #29 
Bama drops from #30 to #43

And there's plenty more.  The biggest benefit of this particular re-ranking is that it exposes the role of all of the other non-reputational factors in determining a law school's overall US News position.

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on April 29, 2009 (boomark / email).