Education and Career for Youth

In this article we will try to provide you with the basic methodologicalapproaches to drawing up law school rankings, because the comprehension of the methods will help you with correct interpretation of these rankings and their results.

According to the method of making up rankings they can be classified by type, structure and data sources.

Rankings, which use a classification by type, include rankings with a single final score. They are used to rank law schools in general. As a result each law school has its own final score, which characterizes the quality of education in this law school in general. This is the most common approach.

This group also includes rankings in specific disciplines and educational programs. In this case, school rankings examine proposed programs or specific subjects. This allows us to determine the quality of various educational programs.

This group also includes rankings of the combined approach.

Rankings, which use the classification by structure, may be ordinal and cluster. The ordinal rankings represent the classification of law schools according to the established order number. The cluster rankings are grouped in three categories – best, average and worse.

Rankings, which use the classification by data sources, are compiled on basis of the available data, which are contained in published reports of law schools, and on basis of the collected data, including surveys of students, employers and graduates.

However, it is necessary to remember about a target group, when making up rankings. This target group determines the form of rankings and the way of presentation of results. The main consumers of this rankings are prosperity students which want to choose an appropriate law school and educational program. And, of course, schools themselves are the consumers of such rankings. At the same time schools need to have detailed and many-sided information. Targeting to a consumer group determines the concept of ranking, indicators and presentation of results.

Do not forget that the choice of indicators is crucial in preparing the rankings. For example, the indicator of marks of entrants on standard entrance exams. This indicator of the quality of a certain school is severely criticized for several years, because it reflects the level of preparation of prosperity students and not the quality of knowledge that students obtain in this school. Although this indicator should be considered indirect, as “high quality” law schools attract the most gifted students. The preference is given to indicators describing the educational process (ie, the quality of teaching) and results (eg, successful employment of school graduates). Similarly, we can call in question the possibility of numerical evaluation of the quality of a law school.

One of the most common methods of transforming of selected indicators in the rankings is the method of weighting and summation. Here, each indicator is assigned weight in accordance with the importance attached to it, and then all indices are summed taking into account the weighting factors for the final score. Depending on the number of indicators and their assigned weights one of the indicators may prevail over the other, or slightly less important factors can outweigh others, which are critically important.

Therefore, interested persons and organizations should carefully interpret the results of any school ranking, and they shouldn’t consider these results to be the ultimate truth. Law school rankings are only one type of background information, and users themselves will have to assess the credibility of the results and reliability of the used techniques.