National Jurist has come out with a new law school ranking that completely disregards the criteria used by traditional ranking systems.
Instead of looking at GPA or LSAT scores, National Jurist said its "goal was to provide an alternative ranking that was focused more on results and service, and that would provide legal education with admirable incentives."
TaxProf Blog has a complete breakdown of National Jurist's ranking system, including how the magazine uses RateMyProfessors.com as a ranking tool:
Post-Graduate Success: 50%
Employment Rate: 22.5%
Super Lawyers: 12.5%
Partners in NLJ 200: 10%
Bar Passage: 5%
Student Satisfaction: 35%
RateMyProfessors.com: 20%
Princeton Review: 15%
Affordability and Diversity: 15%
Debt: 10%
Diversity: 5%
Check out the 15 best law schools, according to National Jurist's rankings:
These rankings, first brought to our attention by Above The Law, are problematic for a number of reasons.
They rely heavily on a website that allows students to either rant or rave about professors based on their personal experiences.
Plus, RateMyProfessors.com is notoriously inaccurate when it comes to law professors, according to University of Chicago Law School professor Brian Leiter.
Leiter examined National Jurist's rankings and then checked out RateMyProfessors.com and found the site often fails to actually classify law professors as law professors, meaning they aren't rated properly, which completely skews National Jurist's rankings.
In short, 20% of the overall score is fraudulent on its face," Leiter wrote on his blog Brian Leiter's Law School Reports. "And it's that 20% that explains all the variance."
Secondly, Yale and Harvard law schools are almost universally recognized as two of the best law schools in the country. To have them ranked so low, and surpassed by other, lesser known schools damages this new ranking's credibility.
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