You might not want your school to rise, I don’t know. But if you do, you might encourage your dean or associate dean to fill out this survey on your school’s use of best practices in legal education, which along with information on bar passage rates relative to entering credentials, and student satisfaction, will be used to compile a list of law schools that provide exceptional “value added” for students.
Who’s doing this? A couple of law professors — myself and Dave Fagundes of Southwestern Law — with a dream: of law schools competing on educational quality, and a Race To The Top that improves legal education across the board. We’re joined by a terrific Advisory Board, still in formation, that includes fomer deans like Daniel Rodriguez, former San Diego dean now at Texas, and Nancy Rapoport, former dean at Houston and Nebraska/now at UNLV, as well as leading scholars on legal education and other topics like Susan Sturm (Columbia) and Bill Henderson (Indiana).
After compiling the list of “value-added” schools, we’re going to deliver the information to U.S. News survey respondents, and encourage them to use it in filling out the survey in November. One possibility is that the value-added data will show that certain schools that have not historically received high ratings ought to receive a “4″ or “5″ from both law professors and lawyers. Given the current lack of information about the relative quality of law schools, and the weight given to the survey responses in U.S. News’s methodology (40%) we believe that this additional information will have a significant — and positive — effect on the U.S. News rankings for those schools that we highlight. » Read the rest of this entry «