If Robert Morse meant to impress with his blog-post declaration that he was “seriously considering” changing the formula for the U.S. News & World Report rankings to cut down on the gaming of the system, he didn’t score very high with one Bay Area law school dean.
UC-Hastings’ Nell Newton said that Morse, director of data research at the magazine in charge of the popular list, is seen by many as “the Emperor of Evil,” and his methodology as “deeply flawed.”
“He’s not an empirical scholar,” she told Legal Pad this afternoon. “The guy doesn’t have a Ph.D., he’s selling magazines.”
Our pals at the National Law Journal ran a commentary on Morse’s intentions — mainly to start counting law schools’ part-time programs in July, but the dust was kicked up by the Wall Street Journal today, which slapped the issue on its front page and posted a related item on its Law Blog.
Morse discussed the issue in his original blog post:
Many people have told us that some law schools operate part-time J.D. programs for the purpose of enrolling students who have far lower LSAT and undergrad GPAs than the students admitted to the full-time program in order to boost their admission data reported to U.S. News and the ABA. In other words, many contend that these aren't truly separate part-time programs but merely a vehicle to raise a law school's LSAT and undergrad GPA for its U.S. News ranking.
Hastings slid from 36th last year to share 38th place with three other schools in 2008. The rankings, Newton says, are designed to benefit the smallest private schools that charge a “real tuition” and spend more money per student. It tends to hurt large public schools, she said. And even if it wasn’t so flawed, given the nature of the methodology, “no matter what he does, it’s just going to create a new opportunity to game the system.”
| Swim With Sharks Our law school blog, The Shark, obsesses over the rankings issue. Check it out. |
Still, Morse seems to have rankled a few nerves, according to the NLJ. Some deans apparently aired their feelings on the American Bar Association listserv, maintaining that the proposed change “is unfair, illogical, and potentially lethal to the continued existence of many part-time programs.”
Morse’s proposed change would presumably benefit Hastings. Since the school does not have a part-time program, making other schools count those allegedly lower-score programs might make Hastings rise in comparison.
— Petra Pasternak
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