| Topic Name: |
Which law school is #1 ? |
| Message Name: |
Ordinal v. Categorical |
| Date Posted: |
02/19/2000 |
| In Reply To: |
I fully realize and acknowledge that the ranking of law schools is inherently subjective. That, however, does not necessarily mean that ranking schools is a bad idea.
I feel that rankings are simply an attempt to relate the schools to eachother in a way that reaches some level of consensus as to the quality of a school. This may not be objective but it is less idiosyncratic and biased.
Furthermore, I am not advocating that rankings be the end point of one's decision to which law school to attend. Rather, I think that rankings are a beginning point from which one can help match a school to their preferrences, desires, and abilities.
I also agree that the lines between tiers is fuzzy. It is for that reason that I believe ordinal rankings are better than categorical rankings. The "error" between ordinal rankings is probably smaller than the error between categories. Certainly, a school that is ranked #4 may, in your opinion, really be a #7, but that 3 slot error is less than the difference between tier 1 and tier two. |
| Message: |
I think the value of ordinal vs. categorical rankings depends in large part on what the rankings are intended to do. If one was using the rankings to judge the relative worth of a school like Fordham to a school like Boston University, one might hesitate to use categorical rankings because of the risk that one of those schools might fall at the bottom end of one category, while the other school falls at the top end of a lower category, but the audience assumes that the school at the higher group is much better than the other school.
However, this caution as to the use of categorical rankings doesn't quite hold for the "top 15 list" that you put out. It is quite obvious both from your list and from the responses that it elicited, that the discussion on this board is focused not on broadly defined groupings, but on figuring out the exact numerical "rankings" of the very top schools.
Why can't we just say that these 15 schools are the top 15, and leave it at that? Arrange their names alphabetically. Sure, it might be unfair to school #16, who falls into the 16-30 category, but school #16 is not being discussed here (and we don't even know what school #16 is).
While a difference between a #4 and a #7 is smaller than the difference between tier 1 and tier 2 (if those tiers each include a large number of schools), the discussion so far has been about issues such as whether #7 should actually be #4.
We can argue about #4 and #7 all we want, but no one side of the argument will ever "win." We can, however, probably all agree that both school #4 and school #7 are two of the top 15 schools.
If anyone wants to argue about #14 and #15, then things might get tricky, but I believe it is better to be a bit off about which school is #15 and which is in group "16-30", than to try and assign a numerical rank to the top several schools. People are much more cognizant of which school is "ranked #5" or "ranked #6" than they are about which school is ranked #15 or #16, if for no other reason than that the closer you are to the top, the more insistent you become that you are the top.
Getting back basketball: assume that there is a CBA team who believes that they are actually better than the current Bulls. They might be upset that people view them---a CBA team---with less respect than the Bulls. But they won't really care THAT much, because they realize that even if people acknowledged them as better than the Bulls, they're still nowhere near the top. But take two teams like the Lakers and the Trailblazers. An argument about who is the better team will be much more heated, because much more is at stake.
The same goes for law schools; the more contentious debate will surround the top several schools. It is a debate that will go unresolved, and rankings such as the list that you put out will only serve to make people mad, without in any way settling the issue. (Can you imagine most Harvard students saying: "oh yeah, Yale is number 1, we're number 2"?)
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