Miscellaneous

The Real Law School Rankings

Sure, the U.S. News & World Report rankings may be the ones every looks at when seeing how "good" a law school is, but the more important rankings are the brand new Party Law School Rankings. Arizona State comes in number 1, and Baylor comes in dead last at 102.

While I applaud the idea of this list, I call bullshit on it, as my alma matter BU comes in way down at 75. The list purports to be put together based in small part on "alcohol access" and in large part on surveys which asked about general student happiness, going out, alcohol and drug consumption and dateability.

But here's the thing -- those surveys were done by sending e-mails to students and asking for a response. But of course, if students are out boozing and having a good time they're not going to bother responding to some bullshit survey e-mail. The site purports to have accounted for this:

We spammed current law students with a "Please take our survey" email. We considered using the amount of responses per school as a factor in the rankings, as students with enough free time to answer such a frivolous email probably deserve recognition, but we were concerned about punishing schools for spam detection.

If any school had a low response rate, we dispatched campus reps to directly collect survey answers. Every survey contained five questions from each of the four categories below (20 questions total.)

Bullshit. The amount of response is way important -- a school loaded with the type of tools who are answering spam e-mail surveys rather than out partying aren't exactly fun times. And I'm not sure I believe that this site actually went onto campuses to conduct in-person surveys but, even if they did, now the whole list is thrown off. Because people are going to answer a survey in-person differently than via e-mail, so you can't fairly compare those numbers and results.

So I officially declare shenanigans on this list. Shenanigans!

(Hat tip: TaxProf Blog)

Full post as published by Quiz Law on May 15, 2009 (boomark / email).