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How Much Did Law Schools Really Game the U.S. News Ranking?

Published: Jul 27, 2009

 Education       Grad School       

For the fourth year in a row, Agoraphilia, a public interest blog, has posted a comparison of U.S. News & World Report's law school ranking and American Bar Association (ABA) scores. Despite all the of this year's buzz about gaming the rankings (e.g., Brooklyn Law School) and survey mishaps (e.g., U.S. News called Loyola Law School Los Angeles by its less-used university name, Loyola Marymount University, which caused the school to drop in the peer review ranking), the graph comparing the two scores supports the overall validity of U.S. News' methodology. Moreover, as both the ABA and U.S. News data are self-reported by the schools, their close alignment means that they supplied the same statistics to both organizations. In other words, any gaming was kept to a minimum. Good news for U.S. News. See below for the graph from Agoraphilia.

Agoraphilia U.S. News-ABA graph

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