Tuesday, April 01, 2008

More suggestions about changing the rankings

See Brian Leiter's open letter to Bob Morse of USNWR (here). Although I don't agree with all of Brian's suggestions, I certainly commend his efforts to suggest ways of reducing schools' abilities to game the rankings with easily manipulable or fraudulent data. As I suggest in an earlier post (here), let's continue brainstorming ways to make these rankings more useful as a consumer tool. They're not going to go away, and they're not going to stop being ordinal in nature (my biggest objection to them); but at least we can suggest ways to make them less bad. Shout-outs to Anonymous (but any of you could take credit for the comment, as it's anonymous) and to Ann Bartow for their comments on my earlier post.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Prof. Rapport:

I just read the ABA Journal article about law school rankings. I haven't thought about those rankings since I was in law school (University of Houston Law Center Class of 2006). Now that I'm on the verge of being two years out of law school, I realize how much time I wasted "researching" those rankings. I was at UH during the infamous rankings drop. I look back at those times, and I think who cares. I really enjoy my job now. This job is not a reflection of those rankings, but this job is a reflection of my hard work. I think if US News & World report stopped marketing the data they compile as rankings, rather than just a guide, that would really go along way in decreasing all the hype around these rankings.

Kyle Myers
- Assistant District Attorney
El Paso County, Texas
- University of Houston
Law Center '06