Posts Tagged ‘US News’

Components of US News Law-School Rankings (II)

Monday, August 24th, 2009

Tom Bell (Chapman) has another installment of his the components of US News law-school rankings: How Top-Ranked Law Schools Got That Way, Pt. 2.  In this installments, he stacks the components of the top 22 schools in a bar-graph.  Stip to come:  top 41-51, top 94-100 and bottom 8.

Gary Rosin

Components of the 2010 US News Rankings of the Top 100 Law Schools

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

The official (as opposed to the leaked2010 US News Law School rankings came out today.  Over at MoneyLaw, Tom Bell has an interesting post, How Top-Ranked Law Schools Got That Way, Pt. I. He looks at the weighted standardized scores on each of the 12 components of the overall score.  He then compares the amounts by which the component scores vary among the top 100, and the top 12, law schools.  As expected, the peer reputation scores (PeerRep) vary (and count) the most.  The surprising result is that the second highest variation is in overall expenditures per student (Over$/Stu):

[T]he Over$/Stu z-scores range quite widely, with Yale having more than double the score of all but two schools, Harvard and Stanford, which themselves manage less than two-thirds Yale’s Over$/Stu score. That wide spread gives the Over$/Stu score an especially powerful influence on Yale’s overall score, making it almost as important as Yale’s PeerRep score and much more important than any of the school’s remaining 10 z-scores. In effect, Yale’s extraordinary expenditures per student buy it a tenured slot at number one.

If would be interesting to see the relative component contributions for Tiers 3 and 4, as well as Tiers 2 and 3.

Gary Rosin

Assessing US News Peer Assessment

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

Over at Inside Higher Ed, Stephanie Lee, in Reputation Without Rigor, looks at the methodology behind the US News peer assessment survey.   Inside Higher Ed obtained the peer assessment survey form submitted by 48 of the top100 public universities in 2009 US News university rankings.  While she found some gaming, some “major oddities,” most respondents gave “honest, if imperfect” responses.   Her overall conclusion:

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

Assessing Student Learning: A Report from the Eastern Front

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009

Educating Lawyers:  Preparation for the Profession of Law (2007) started it (again).  Then the ABA adopted minimum Bar passage standards for law schools (Interpretation 301-6 of the Standards for Law School Approval).  Then the ABA’s Standards Review Commmittee appointed a Special Committee on Outcome Measures (Report and Comments).  The upshot is that law schools are going to be paying much more attention to assessing student learning.  Law schools are latecomers at this.  You might even say we’re a back-water.  The rest of the American academy started a while ago, not to mention grades K-12 and No Child Left Behind.

On the Brainstorm blog on the Chronicle of Higher Education website, Sara Goldrick-Rab asks “Is Our Student’s Learning?”  She discusses a recent presentation, at the meeting of the American Sociological Association, on the CLA Longitudinal Study.  According to Goldrick-Rab, one of the findings is that

[S]tudents who start behind tend to stay behind; put another way those inequalities at the starting gate are consistent.

Certainly, that’s what my analysis of law-school first-time Bar-passage rates shows:  Law schools whose students have lower LSAT scores have lower Bar passage rates.  See Unpacking the Bar:  Of Cut Scores and Competence, 32 J. Legal Prof. 67 (2008) (submission draft).

For law schools with a greater number of at-risk students, the question is whether better instructional practices and assessment, as well as academic support, can improve student learning.

Gary Rosin

Rankings: Peer Assessments and Test Scores

Monday, August 17th, 2009

Inside Higher Ed has an interesting piece, More Questions on Rankings, on an article by Kyle Sweitzer (Michigan State) & J. Fredericks Volkwein (Penn State), Prestige Among Graduate and Professional Schools: Comparing the U.S. News’ Graduate School Reputation Ratings Between Disciplines (forthcoming in Research in Higher Education).  The Inside Higher Ed notes that the article concludes that

Peer reviewers also seem to place a high emphasis on standardized test scores, with the average score significant for all of the graduate categories except education. Test scores also appear to have the greatest influence on the reputation (as measured by the survey) in law and medical schools.

Update:  Over on TaxProf, Paul Caron discusses the article in Peer Reputation:  Size Matters, 

Gary Rosin