Law Schools

Holy Crap! You Won't Believe The Reason This Law School 'Fell' In The USNWR Rankings

Don't mess with U.S. News.

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In the parlance of law school rankings, the term “rank not published” is coded language meant to convey that the school is (to use a colorful colloquialism) in the crapper, and people usually group “unranked” schools right along with RNP schools. But when the official U.S. News & World Report rankings are released on Tuesday and a school that was ranked at 72 last year suddenly finds itself in the depths of the unranked, you should take that information with a grain of salt.

It seems in the 2018 leaked rankings we told you about last week, Pepperdine Law School made a noteworthy jump — from 72 to 59. When the powers that be at Pepperdine got wind of the change, they re-crunched the numbers and realized there’d been a mistake. According to an email sent by Pepperdine Dean Paul Caron to all students, there was an “error in reporting our median LSAT for the class that began in Fall, 2017.”

On his blog, Dean Caron discussed the details of how exactly the numbers snafu happened:

On November 29, 2017, we correctly reported to the American Bar Association that the median LSAT for our full-time students was 160 (up from 159 in the prior year). We correctly reported that we do not have a part-time program and that the median LSAT for the entire student body (full- and part-time) thus also was 160. (See the pdf of our report to the ABA below.) This information is available for all the world to see in our 509 report published on the ABA’s website and on Pepperdine law school’s website. (See the pdf of our 509 report below.)

On December 5, 2017, we correctly reported to U.S. News that the median LSAT for our full-time students was 160, and that we do not have a part-time program. But we mistakenly reported that our median LSAT score for our combined full-time (157 students) and part-time (0 students) programs was 162.

To their credit, Pepperdine reported the error to USNWR and requested the publication re-calculate their rankings before release. That… didn’t work out so well for Pepperdine. As Dean Caron’s email notes:

Unfortunately, U.S. News has denied our request and instead issued a revised embargoed electronic version of the rankings that replaced the original.  In the new version, Pepperdine is removed from the rankings.  Instead, Pepperdine is listed as “unranked due to a data reporting error by the school.”

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Rather than just languish in the murky under bottom of the unranked, Pepperdine engaged some rankings experts to find out where they *should* have been ranked. The good news is that Pepperdine should have improved its standing — from 72 to somewhere between 62 and 64:

We contacted three law school rankings experts — Bill Henderson (Indiana), Andy Morriss (Texas A&M), and Mike Spivey (Spivey Consulting) — who all confirmed our analysis that Pepperdine would have ranked 62nd or 64th had U.S. News recomputed the rankings with our correct LSAT median.

Really this story is the ultimate legal academia schadenfreude story. Plus it serves as a powerful reminder — double-, no, triple-check your math before you send it into USNWR.

(Read Dean Caron’s full email to the Pepperdine Law students on the next page.)

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headshotKathryn Rubino is an editor at Above the Law. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

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