Sometimes No (US) News is Good News - Part 2

Sunday, November 20, 2022

Will the UCLA law school join Berkeley, Harvard, and Yale in dropping out of the US News and World Report ranking, as discussed in the prior blog post?* Apparently, not soon, if it entails dropping the LSAT. Here is an excerpt from the NY Times:

... Currently, median test scores and undergraduate grade point average account for 20 percent of the U.S. News rankings...

Russell Korobkin, interim dean of the law school at University of California, Los Angeles, said that if LSAT requirements were dropped — in both admissions and as a measure in U.S. News rankings — he feared that even more weight would be put on undergraduate GPAs.

“The LSAT has its problems, but it at least provides schools with a way to compare students who come from different undergraduate schools who pursue very different courses of study that are subject to different degrees of grade inflation,” Mr. Korobkin said in an email... At No. 15, U.C.L.A. is tantalizingly close to the T14. Its dean, Mr. Korobkin, said he was concerned that if U.C.L.A. joined in a boycott, U.S. News would marshal data in a way that hurt the school.

“Before I delved into this, I was definitely thinking we would be on this bandwagon to try to end the strangulation on the law schools that the U.S. News & World Report rankings have,” he said. Now, he said, he is not so sure. The question, he said, is whether refusing to provide data is likely to create changes “that are more consistent with our values.” U.C.L.A. competes with its immediate rivals — like the University of Texas at Austin and Georgetown — to break into the Top 14, he said...

Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/18/us/law-school-rankings-testscores.html.

* https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2022/11/sometimes-no-us-news-is-goodnews.html.

T o h e a r t h e t e x t a b o v e , c l i c k o n t h e l i n k b e l o w : https://ia601402.us.archive.org/25/items/big-ten/ucla%20law%20rank.mp3