preLaw - Back To School 2008 - (Page 32) Love them or loathe them While there are a variety of blogs, Web sites and print publications that critique law schools, one ratings system has been the gold standard. U.S. News & World Report’s America’s Best Graduate Schools puts the Educational experts have long debated whether rankings — particularly those developed by U.S. News — are a valid way to screen law schools. Some pre-law advisors believe students should peruse the magazine’s rankings in Other advisors say they strongly discourage students from using the U.S. News rankings, noting the criteria used to judge a law school’s quality are ques- My advice to students is to ignore those rankings and pretend like everyone who is not admitted to Yale is happy with their placement. — Hans J. Hacker, co-director of the Pre-Law Center at Arkansas State University nation’s 184 accredited law schools in a simple, easy-to-digest numerical ranking. This ranking is based on a variety of criteria, such as peer assessments, median LSAT scores, graduate employment rates and student-to-faculty ratios. Each item receives a specific weight, and they are added together to determine the “best” law schools. The magazine also finds the best schools in specialties like trial advocacy, dispute resolution, or intellectual property and environmental law. the process of choosing a law school, particularly if they are deciding between a handful of schools. They say the rankings can help them in one of the toughest choices they must make. “They might help you focus on your decision-making process, and it doesn’t hurt,” said Donald C. Heilman, an attorney and director of compliance, research & assessment for the Office of Student Affairs at Rutgers University. “The ratings are a tool, but they’re only one tool.” tionable at best and deeply flawed at worst. “Rankings become more of a distraction than a resource for educating students on which school is the best fit for them and for their career aims,” said Hans J. Hacker, an assistant professor and co-director of the Pre-Law Center at Arkansas State University. “It's not the methodology that concerns me any more. It's the theory behind the entire enterprise.” Hacker added that he’s become more and more concerned over the past several years as he’s watched several law schools with excellent faculty, fine facilities, outstanding opportunities and career placement services and excellent bar passage rates get hammered in the law school rankings for reasons he simply does not understand. For 2009, the top five university law programs were Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia and New York University. U.S. News began its graduate-school rankings in the early 1990s. And as soon as they were published, people from all areas of the educational arena — especially law school deans — began to pick them apart. On the other hand, schools that received the top rankings or those whose rankings improved often sent out press releases to announce the good news — including some of those previously disgruntled deans. Most recently, two law school professors attacked the U.S. News rankings for producing “bad choices” in a National Law Journal special section published April 14, 2008, on graduate employment trends. The authors — Indiana University School of Law-Bloomington Prof. William D. Henderson and University of Illinois College of Law Prof. Andrew P. Morriss — studied the magazine’s rankings. Their consensus was that students should focus ” MARQUETTE LAW SCHOOL Marquette University Law School Office of Admissions Sensenbrenner Hall 1103 W. Wisconsin Avenue P.O. Box 1881 Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53201-1881 Telephone: (414) 288-6767 Website: law.marquette.edu E-mail: law.admission@marquette.edu LAW SCHOOL 32 preLaw http://law.marquette.edu http://law.marquette.edu
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