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&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Blogger Budges Behemoth in Rankings Rethink!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Kudos to Paul Caron of the estimable Tax Prof blog&lt;em&gt; &lt;/em&gt;(and a dean and at University of Cincinnati&#39;s Law School) who wrote a recent post asking Did 16 Law Schools Commit Rankings Malpractice? (Ans: &lt;i&gt;Hell Yes&lt;/i&gt;.)&amp;nbsp; The upshot of Caron&amp;rsquo;s findings is that a growing number of law schools are not reporting their at-graduation employment rates to &lt;em&gt;U.S. News&lt;/em&gt;, thereby gaming that rankings scheme&amp;rsquo;s convoluted methodology. &lt;i&gt;U.S. News&lt;/i&gt; has publicly disclosed that it estimates the employed at graduation figure for nonreporting schools with this&amp;nbsp;formula:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;ldquo;Employed at Nine Months&amp;rdquo; [minus] 30% points = &amp;ldquo;Employed at Graduation&amp;rdquo; &lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;To which the only response could be: &amp;ldquo;huh?&amp;rdquo; The rational basis for this specific formula is obscure, but it was apparently intended to &lt;em&gt;&amp;ldquo;&lt;/em&gt;capture the relationship, on average, between the two variables for schools reporting both numbers.&quot; (This is according to the law review article &lt;u&gt;Understanding the &lt;/u&gt;.) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;It hardly takes a criminal mind to quickly realize that, especially in a dismal legal job market, many schools will help themselves in the rankings by simply withholding that data point from &lt;i&gt;U.S. News&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Robert Morse, the U.S. News rankings czar, and a guy who &lt;i&gt;never&lt;/i&gt; gets Christmas cards from law school deans, acknowledged this methodological loophole on his blog, Morse Code, and went so far as to promise:&lt;em&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;U.S. News&lt;/em&gt;&lt;i&gt; is planning to significantly change its estimate for the at-graduation rate employment for nonresponding schools in order to create an incentive for more law schools to report their actual at- graduation employment rate data. This new estimating procedure will not be released publicly before we publish the rankings.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Morse and &lt;i&gt;U.S. New&lt;/i&gt;&amp;rsquo;s forthright response to this matter is admirable, but I think the greater lesson ought to be on the virtues of simplicity and &amp;ldquo;Criteria that Matter.&amp;rdquo;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p align=&quot;right&quot;&gt;-posted by brian&lt;/p&gt;

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