If our peer assessment is going up, and yet our ranking is going down… well, then it would appear that our slip in the rankings is directly attributable to that remaining 60%.

My point was that our greatest losses have been in our faculty. We haven’t been recruiting talented professors as hard as we should be and the school lets some professors get by without significant publishing. One of the main reasons is not spending per student, but low faculty salaries. Our salaries here are lower than our peer institutions, including Minnesota.

Regardless, my overall point is that while 40% of the ranking comes from the subjective opinions of others, the other 60% comes from objective factors over which the University has varying, but always significant, levels of control, such as the faculty, the acceptance rate, and the median LSAT and GPAs. Solving the problems that we have on the objective side will almost certainly influence the subjective side as well, because the opinions of lawyers, judges and our academic peers have to be based on something.

Yes, I think you’re right in one sense: this is how USNWR computes the score. The article I read might have re-weighted the score using “a forced mean and standard deviation,” the same method that USNWR uses, but might have done it a different way. In sum, I don’t know if it’s just a mistake or just a different way of looking at how the rankings are weighted. Either way, we both agree that the rankings are subjective and based chiefly on others’ perceptions; we also agree that people can really hurt the law school with public outcry.

Unless I am misreading the methodology, as I am not a statistician, Median LSAT amounts for 12.5%, not 2.5%. See, e.g., http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/best-graduate-schools/2008/03/26/law-methodology.html.

As a general reply, yes the rankings are flawed, but the system is in place and we have to compete in it. There’s no way to objectively determine what the best legal education is. As an example, there’s no way to objectively determine what the best baseball team in a given year is, which is why we have the subjective definition of, “The team that wins the championship is subjectively considered the best” in place. It would be irrational for the KC Royals to argue that the World Series is a flawed system for picking the champion, rather than to try to improve themselves in order to compete in the system that is in place. As it relates to law school, the objective factors, such as median LSAT and GPA, are the only thing we can control which will in turn increase the subjective factors.

Of course, you’re right that immature, uninformed responses hurt the law school’s reputation, which is bad, and I think the law school community has done a good job of curbing that after a brief reactionary period.

Tim