Earlier this year, Paul Caron listed the peer assessment scores from the 2010 US News law school rankings. The rating scale runs from 1 (highest) to 5 (lowest). Here’s how the numbers fell out:
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).