the reputational survey is subject to problems, such as haphazard responses and apathetic respondents, that add to the lingering questions about its legitimacy.

Some of the persons who responded on behalf of universities complained of the difficulty of giving an overall evaluation of a university, as opposed to particular programs.  Presumably, that’s less of a problem for the law-school survey.  The real problem was time:

Ten hours. With 260-some colleges, giving each two or three minutes of attention, that’s how long it would take to adequately respond to the U.S. News survey, estimates Daniel M. Fogel, president of the University of Vermont. And he says that’s time no one like him can afford to spend.

With the number of law schools at 200 or so (and growing!), the time problem also affects the law-school peer assessment surveys.

Gary Rosin

Average: 2.55

Percentiles
     25th between 1.9 (22nd) and 2.0 (30th)
     50th between 2.3 (47th) & 2.4 (55th)
     75th about 2.9

The distribution (with a normal reference curve) looks like this:

Looking at the actual scores, the distribution is decidedly non-normal.  Of particular interest are the “fat tails”–the distributions of the top and bottom 25 percent, which are much larger than would be expected with a normal distribution.  The top 75% of law schools have peer assessments have a range of 1.5 points (1.4 to 1.9), while the for bottom 25%, peer assessments have a slightly larger range, 1.7 points (from 3.1 to 4.8).