A new law school ranking system has been released by the National Jurist that is much different from the traditional systems used to rank law schools, according to Business Insider.
According to National Jurist, its “goal was to provide an alternative ranking that was focused more on results and service, and that would provide legal education with admirable incentives.”
The ranking system used by National Jurist was broken down by the blog TaxProf. It also has how the magazine uses the website RateMyProfessors.com as a ranking tool. The breakdown of the ranking system is below:
Post-Graduate Success: 50%
Employment Rate: 22.5%
Super Lawyers: 12.5%
Partners in NLJ 200: 10%
Bar Passage: 5%
Student Satisfaction: 35%
RateMyProfessors.com: 20%
Princeton Review: 15%
Affordability and Diversity: 15%
Debt: 10%
Diversity: 5%
Many people are criticizing these new rankings because the rankings use comments made by students on a forum website about their teachers. Students can pretty much write whatever they want, either positive or negative, on the site.
According to Brian Leiter, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, the website is inaccurate when it comes to law professors. He checked the rankings of National Jurist and compared them to the website. He discovered that the site fails to classify law professors as law professors most of the time. This means that those professors are not receiving proper ratings, which in turn skews the rankings by National Jurist.
On his blog, Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports, he wrote, “In short, 20% of the overall score is fraudulent on its face. And it’s that 20% that explains all the variance.”