Did Brooklyn Law School Game the Rankings?
Today, the Wall Street Journal Law Blog published excerpts from an interview with US News Data czar Bob Morse. In the interview, Morse confirmed that part-time and full-time admissions data were combined in the 2010 edition:
“In the past, we’d just used full-time [admissions data]. But some schools we think were gaming the system. There were some part-time programs that were set up just for US News reporting purposes.”
This new policy is likely to blame for the rankings decline of schools such as Fordham and George Washington. The one school seemingly not impacted by this new policy? Brooklyn. As many of our readers noted, Brooklyn’s part-time program was missing from the new Part-Time Rankings. Our readers further claimed that Brooklyn’s LSAT spread did not match up to the school’s combined program LSAT spread.
Our readers were correct. The LSAT spread found on the US News Rankings (162-165) matches the full-time spread found on the Brooklyn Law website (162-165). It does appear that the part-time spread (158-160) was factored into the new rankings. According to the latest LSAC data sheet, Brooklyn’s full-program LSAT spread should have been 159-164.
Currently, Brooklyn is sharing the 61 spot with a cluster of other schools. A one or two point shift in their overall score would drop the school 5-10 places in the rankings.
So, did Brooklyn game the rankings by not including their part-time program for consideration? Probably. We emailed every dean listed on the Brooklyn website; we will update this post if any respond.
A follow up post can be found here.
See also: The leaked 2010 US News Rankings
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7:11 pm on April 22nd, 2009
Maybe US News forgot to include it? Did that ever occur to you?
5:44 am on April 23rd, 2009
The 2010 rankings are based on 2008 data. The data you found on the website is from 2007.
I don’t understand how you think a school would get away with “hiding” its part-time numbers when it has to report them to the ABA and there is information about the part-time program all over the U.S. News website. (For instance, the school profile contains part-time tuition, number of part-time students enrolled, etc.)
The much more likely explanation, as the poster above suggested, is that U.S. News accidentally omitted Brooklyn from the part-time rankings. You’ll note that there are 85 schools listed in the part-time rankings but the part-time methodology section says it ranked 87 schools with part-time programs. Brooklyn and one other school are missing, but U.S. News is not unaware of their existence.
8:25 am on April 23rd, 2009
Either the US News messed up or Brooklyn cheated.
hmmm….
8:58 am on April 23rd, 2009
From the BLS website
“The following is for the entering class of 2008:”
BLS should be ashamed
9:02 am on April 23rd, 2009
[...] IU-B celebrates jump in rankings here. Useful Links Did Brooklyn Law School game the rankings? Probably. Leiter has the reputation scores posted here. Photographs of the full rankings can be found here. [...]
9:23 am on April 23rd, 2009
Certainly, if Brooklyn Law School had a rational explanation for this, they would have responded by now.
Why don’t you contact Robert Morse at US News, who publishes the rankings, and ask him to explain what happened?
11:34 am on April 23rd, 2009
Typical of Brooklyn Law School. I expect nothing less. Dean Wexler is obsessed with keeping rankings up. I’m guessing the reason it’s not up there is because the school completely caters to full time students, if the part time rankings were included, their rank would drop.
12:14 pm on April 23rd, 2009
Just take a moment to think about which is more likely. One possibility is that there is an omission in a list that says it includes 87 schools but in fact includes only 85. The other is that Brooklyn somehow managed to hide its part-time program while supplying information about it (number of part-time students, etc.) and notwithstanding the fact that it (a) is required to provide part-time numbers to the ABA and (b) has always provided part-time numbers to U.S. News. I’ll let you be the judge since I’ve already been outed as the “dumb” one here.
I was looking on a different page that included 2007 numbers, which were the same as the numbers listed here for 2008.
In any case, the rankings depend on the median. The median for the class is 163, as it says in U.S. News and all over the BLS website. (Indeed, the website also indicates that 61% — that’s 38th percentile and up — of the class of 2009 scored 163+. See http://www.brooklaw.edu/career/classprofile/.)
1:21 pm on April 23rd, 2009
Occam’s Razor is like that point early in a case when one side hasn’t figured out what their defense is, so they try to ridicule the other side’s case and throw out a number of unsupported alternative theories so that they are not pinned down to any one explanation which can be easily disproved.
If Brooklyn has an explanation for this — like it is US News’ error, not theirs — they should just say so. if they are incorrectly reporting too low LSAT numbers on their own website but US News has the correct, higher numbers — they should just say so. It is not hard to get out the file of what they sent to US News and see if it was correct. Heck, they could provide a pdf of what they sent to US News to completely exonerate themselves. But they have apparently not responded. So what’s the most likely reason they have not responded? Because the answer will help them but they don’t want to brag?
1:56 pm on April 23rd, 2009
[...] Did Brooklyn Law School Game the Rankings? 2010 US News Rankings Leaked – Confirmed Valid Posted in [...]
7:50 pm on April 23rd, 2009
Or . . . maybe Brooklyn just doesn’t know what happened and why it’s not on the list and isn’t in the business of answering bizarre accusations from random bloggers that have so few posts and readers. Just sayin’. Go for it, contact U.S. News with your amazing investigative reporting. I’m sure they’ll hop to.
8:29 pm on April 23rd, 2009
]]Go for it, contact U.S. News with your amazing investigative reporting. I’m sure they’ll hop to.
Okay, Mr. Sarcastic Occam’s Razor — looks like someone did, and Bob Morse of US News put the following on HIS blog tonight: http://www.usnews.com/blogs/college-rankings-blog/2009/4/23/our-new-grad-school-rankings-are-online.html#Comments
“It has come to our attention, since the law rankings were published, that a few schools might have submitted incorrect data to U.S. News. We are studying these situations very carefully and will have more to say next week.”
8:52 pm on April 23rd, 2009
Occam – we hear you. The story is still developing. Thanks for your comments.
- Law School Headlines
9:01 pm on April 23rd, 2009
[...] reported yesterday that Brooklyn Law School benefited from the mysterious exclusion of their part-time [...]
9:23 am on April 24th, 2009
Well, on the positive side of things, this is the first time Brooklyn Law School has been relevant in a very long time…
10:53 am on April 24th, 2009
Brooklyn School of Law is where Joe Pesci went.
9:23 pm on April 25th, 2009
[...] this week we wrote, much to the dismay of one of our readers, that Brooklyn Law School had probably gamed the [...]
10:15 am on April 27th, 2009
[...] we reported that both Nebraska and Brooklyn submitted bad data. Neither of these law schools are ranked above Florida, so these errors did not [...]
8:06 pm on May 5th, 2009
[...] spot. We investigated most of these tips and wrote about anything interesting that turned up. (See here, here, here, and here) We were even typing up a “Did 64 Law Schools Game the Rankings?” [...]
11:03 am on May 17th, 2009
What kind of implications are we looking at if is it proven that BLS did in fact game the rankings?
I am highly considering BLS for the fall, would this be a major black eye? Has any school in the past been shown to game the rankings? if so what was the result?
Should this at all be a consideration in choosing which school to goto?
12:19 pm on May 17th, 2009
Brooklyn won’t be punished…
1:01 pm on May 18th, 2009
[...] Brooklyn Speaks Out About Rankings Re: Brooklyn Gaming the Rankings Did Brooklyn Law School Game the Rankings? Posted in Clinic News, Miscellaneous | Tags: Brooklyn [...]