Law School Rankings: Color-Coded Changes, 2013 to 2014

Ever wonder what it would look like to take the US News & World Report Law School Rankings - all schools, all reported data - and color code the changes from the previous year in green (good change), red (bad change) and yellow (no change)? It would look something like this:

The entire, 29-page PDF of this is embedded below via SCRIBD.Com.

For good measure, I got the median LSAT and UGPA figures from the ABA that USN&WR uses to rank schools, but doesn’t publish, and put them next to the 25th and 75th percentiles of LSAT and UGPA, that they DO publish, but do NOT use to rank schools.

More explanations are on the first page of the document itself.

March 27, 2014 Update: Thanks to Paul Caron of Pepperdine School of Law and TaxProf Blog fame for catching that I had the math backwards in the Overall Score column. Those numbers now indicate +/- correctly and have the correct colors.

March 28, 2014 Update: Well, crap - I didn't know SCRIBD required people to join before they could download the PDF - sorry for that! Anyway, here's a direct link to it:

US News and World Report Law School Rankings: 2013 to 2014 Color-Coded Changes for All Reported Law Schools

And here it is embedded for on-line viewing at SCRIBD:

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Where’s the Burning Bush?

And Morses then summoned all legal academia and said "Hear, ye law schools, these Rankings which the Lord Our God, U.S. News, hath given to us this day" ...

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Let the Law School Rankings Games Begin ...

The U.S. News and World Report rankings for law schools will be out next week and one blog post making the rounds is Paul Caron’s “Student Selectivity” ranking of schools based on the new data, or, more likely, an advance copy of the ABA take-off data, which includes some of the same statistics that we all report to the US News folks.

Someone in the comments to that post asked about last year’s data; I had jumped on that so we could see how we did by those two numbers last year, but I decided to post the list for all schools. Prof. Caron’s blog doesn’t go into detail, but, like I say in the document below, I presume he took the median LSAT and UGPA and plugged them into the US News percentages to get a raw number. That’s what I did, so here’s the law school rankings of these stats side by side for this the 2015 and 2014 Rankings. (For anyone reading this who's new to the rankings, U.S. News publishes an "edition" of the ranking titled a year ahead of the calendar year: so we're waiting breathlessly in March 2014 for the "2015 Edition" of the rankings - one of many aggravating little things about working with all this data.)

MARCH 11, 2014 UPDATE

I screwed up the math in my original chart - thanks to Professor Jerry Organ of the University of St. Thomas School of Law for pointing that out. So the new ranking below is my comparison with the correct formula that I should have used to start with - see the explanation before the table for details.

The third leg of the “selectivity” stool - acceptance rate -  is not included in the above. We’ll have to wait until next week for that.


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