The Faculty Lounge

Sovern on Rankings and Law School Priorities: A One Act Play

A recent ssrn digest brings news of Jeff Sovern's latest, "Rankings: A Dramatization of the Incentives Created by Ranking Law Schools." Here's his abstract:

Sellers in a competitive market shift resources from attributes buyers don't care about to attributes buyers do care about. In markets in which buyers rely on imperfect signals for quality, sellers move resources away from improving the quality of their product to enhancing the illusion of quality. For example, before freshness dating, when consumers tested the freshness of bread by squeezing it, bakers reportedly added chemicals to bread to preserve its softness longer, thereby creating the illusion of freshness. Similarly, law school rankings encourage schools to shift resources away from improving the quality of the education they provide in favor of investing in improving their standings in the rankings. Consequently, under the guise of serving the market, rankings which are based on the wrong criteria are likely to subvert the market because they both fail to measure accurately the quality of a school's education and reduce the quality of legal education.

This piece dramatizes some of the ideas discussed in the preceding paragraph. It takes the form of a fifteen minute-play with three characters: a law school dean, a junior law professor, and a law student. The play illustrates how the incentives created by a ranking system could affect law schools and their administrators, faculty, and students. The play format is intended to make the ideas expressed more vivid.

This is similar at some points (though different in form and broader in scope) to stuff we've been hearing a lot about recently, especially from Brian Tamanaha.  I'm always glad when people talk about things like priorities and expenses at law schools.

Alfred Brophy

Law Schools Game US News; Admission Processes Become More Just

It's widely known that law schools use a variety of tools to game the US News law school ranking process.  One effective way to increase the LSAT's of entering first years is to reduce class size.  But this reduction has an economic impact on a law school; tuition revenues drop (and fairly precipitously, in many cases, because these students are often the most likely to pay full freight.)  To pay for this US News gambit, schools often accept sizable cohorts of second year transfers.  Transfer students have two particular traits: they have actually proven they can succeed in law school and they don't get much, if any, scholarship money.  I'm particularly interested in the first trait.

One ongoing critique of university admissions procedures is that their high dependence on standardized tests is both unfair (with arguments, for example, about the role of cultural context in testing) and inaccurate (as a proxy for success in school itself.)    While the LSAT may be a fairly good predictor of law school success, it strikes me that first year grades are a much better predictor.  Thus, to the degree that US News gaming causes good law schools to set aside a substantial number of slots for transfers (and I understand that Georgetown may take as many as 100 rising 2L's), these schools create many more opportunities for students who are great at the task of studying law, but not so good at the proxy.   With or without US News rankings, Georgetown and its kin are likely to lean heavily on standardized tests.  They're a cheap and fairly effective way to compare people with highly dissimilar undergraduate experiences.  But if US News rankings cause these schools to open up more slots to those who have proved their worth in the law school trenches, can that be a bad thing?  I'm not sure that 1L grades are a proxy for intellect or likelihood of success in practice, but they've got to be more relevant to a law school's admissions aspirations than some lousy standardized pre-law test.