Cardozo = Yale

For this week's absurd law school rankings methodology, I give you Paul Caron at TaxProfBlog:

14	UC-Berkeley	369.0	39	Cardozo	340.5
15	Notre Dame	368.5		Yale	340.5
16	Georgetown	367.5	41	Wisconsin	338.5
17	Pepperdine	365.0	42	Samford	338.0

I'm not putting the whole list, but yes, he really did come up with a methodology that put Pepperdine in the top 20 and Yale equal to Cardozo, just ahead of Samford.

Virginia is the top overall school, and BYU is ranked higher than Harvard.

While I still think the USNWR rankings are a sham, coming up with alternative rankings that have similarly-absurd criteria isn't helping anything. To come up with these numbers, Caron took the response numbers from five subjective, non-quantitative Princeton Review surveys that were scored in the 60-99 range. He then averaged the two dealing with professors and added it to the remaining three numbers (about academic experience, admissions selectivity, and career preparation) to get the final numbers.

In other words, since it's based on a 3rd-party's flawed survey responses, it's absolutely, positively statistically sound. Garbage in, clean pure brilliance out, right? Isn't that how that quote works now that we're all living green? But I digress.

I should really come up with my own ranking system. It seems to be an easy way to make it into the news. Just rank someone like St. Thomas 50th or that Arizona State has a vastly superior law school to Cornell or Wash U. and I'm sure the hits skyrocket.

Well, I can play with numbers and claim [TTTT] > [T14], too. Stay tuned.