Various folks have been blogging about the LSAT data provided by Brooklyn Law, and used by US News, in its assessment of the school (as well as the magazine's failure to include Brooklyn's excellent part-time program in its otherwise exhaustive list of such programs.) Now we hear that US News is "investigating the Brooklyn situation."
File this under…awkward!
Update: Brooklyn Law has now issued a press release on the LSAT reporting issue. It states, in part:
Consistent with our view of the appropriate methodology for rankings, we have for many years declined to provide U.S. News with LSAT/GPA information about our part-time students. We have done this openly and without deception. In the past, although U.S. News made part-time information available to its readers, it did not incorporate that information into its mathematical rankings model. When we learned that such a change was under consideration, we vociferously argued against it in a letter to U.S. News. We received no reply, and U.S. News did not announce this change in its methodology.
Accordingly, when we completed the 2009 questionnaire, we reported the LSAT/GPA information about our full-time students. Consistent with prior practice, we left blank the questions about LSAT/GPA of part-time students. Following these two questions was a question that sought combined LSAT/GPA information for all entering students – full-time and part-time. In prior years, we had left that line blank. This year, however, we mistakenly inserted only the information provided for the previous two questions – the LSAT/GPA information for our full-time students. This error was completely inadvertent. There was no intention to hide the existence of our part-time program, as evidenced by substantial other information we provided about our part-time program elsewhere in the questionnaire. Moreover, given the one point difference between the LSAT median of 163 for our full-time students and the LSAT median of 162 for our entire class, we do not know what effect, if any, the omission of data about our part-time students would have had on our U.S. News ranking.
As noted above, we have raised with the editors two other flaws in the U.S. News methodology that result in serious distortions of the rankings. First, many schools depress the size their entering classes and then enroll large numbers of second-year transfer students with lower LSATs and GPAs; because U.S. News considers the numerical credentials only of first-year students, this manipulation results in a higher ranking than if the credentials of all students at the school were taken into account. Second, LL.M. students are not counted in the computation of student-faculty ratio and expenditures per student, notwithstanding the fact that, at many law schools, LL.M students are often enrolled in the same classes as J.D. students and use the same services as J.D. students. The result is to artificially increase the rankings of schools that have such programs. We hope that, at some point, U.S. News will acknowledge these flaws in its methodology and correct them.