Law Schools
Do Law Schools Fudge the Data Reported to US News?
Posted Jul 24, 2009, 06:17 am CST
By Debra Cassens Weiss
A law professor has concluded that data reported to U.S. News & World Report for its law school rankings apparently tracks the information provided to the American Bar Association.
Chapman law professor Tom Bell built a statistical model of law school rankings based on the ABA data, and found the scores were “gratifyingly close” to those generated by U.S. News, according to a summary of Bell’s findings by U.S. News & World Report.
“For now, I'll just offer this happy observation,” Bell wrote at his blog Agoraphilia. “The close fit between USN&WR's scores and the model's scores suggests that law schools did not try game the rankings by telling USN&WR one thing and the ABA (the source of much of the data used in my model) another.”
Some bloggers have questioned whether law schools are trying to manipulate the rankings. For example: Sixty-four law schools didn’t disclose the percentage of their 2007 class employed at graduation for the U.S. News ranking, opting instead for an automatic calculation. When a law school fails to report how many of its graduates are employed at graduation, U.S. News will assign a number that is 30 percent less than the number of the school's graduates employed nine months later.
The speculation is that law schools failed to report the number because they benefited from the automatic calculation.
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