Rankings, U.S. News

The First U.S. News Law School Rankings Screw-Up

What's going to be done about this embarrassing situation?

By  
on

It’s fall, the air is crisp, law schools have been in session for about two months, and faculty members have started to receive their annual ballots for the latest edition of the U.S. News law school rankings. In addition to the overall rankings for each accredited law school in the country, U.S. News puts out a ranking for law specialties in the areas of clinical training, dispute resolution, environmental law, health care law, intellectual property law, international law, legal writing, tax law, and trial advocacy. Each year, a selection of law professors are asked for their input to assist the magazine in ranking those programs, and their ratings make up part of the controversial U.S. News “peer assessment score.”

As luck would have it, U.S. News has already managed to screw up this part of the 2017 rankings. This certainly bodes well for the future.

Professor Paul Caron, who teaches tax law at Pepperdine School of Law and received a survey for the U.S. News tax law specialty ranking, alerted us to the problem at TaxProf Blog. Do you see anything wrong with the ballot he received from U.S. News?

In case the yellow highlighting didn’t help you, what U.S. News purports to be its tax law ballot asks its recipients to rate the quality of alternative dispute resolution courses or programs. Professor Caron notes that colleagues who received surveys in each of the other specialty areas were also asked to rank the quality of ADR courses or programs. Oops!

What’s to be done about this embarrassing situation? Here are Prof. Caron’s thoughts:

Apparently, the wizards at U.S. News and Ipsos, their market research company, customized the first paragraph in each of the nine surveys but did not realize that the second numbered paragraph contains a reference to alternative dispute resolution. Presumably, U.S. News will soon recognize the error, invalidate the survey, and re-send corrected surveys to voters.

Here’s hoping that the “wizards at U.S. News” don’t screw up anything else.

Sponsored

Pepperdine Is Ranked #1 In Alternative Dispute Resolution … And Tax, Clinical Training, Intellectual Property, Etc.? [TaxProf Blog]

Sponsored

Topics

, , , , , , , , ,