Rankings are Dangerous!
Which do you want, better lawyers or better test takers?
A school might, for example, attempt to improve its bar-pass rate, if that is one of the criteria used in the rankings. At present, most law teachers attempt to teach lessons that make their students better lawyers. To improve the bar-pass rate, teachers will spend more time teaching lessons related to that test and less time on the material they chose when their goal was to make good lawyers. In other words, less preparation for the bar may mean more preparation for life. If schools change their teaching to improve their bar-pass rate, they will produce worse lawyers and citizens.
Moreover, schools trying to improve their bar-pass rate might reduce admissions of students in groups that are statistically unlikely to pass the bar. Instead of trying to predict who will make a good lawyer, schools will try to identify who can pass the bar. Inclusion of bar-pass rates in ranking systems may make law schools and lawyers worse. If bar-pass rates affect rankings, law schools will produce a larger number of lesser lawyers rather than smaller number of superior ones.
Should those to be given legal training be chosen by one exam?
The use of LSAT statistics in rankings can also be harmful. If a ranking uses the 25th percentile LSAT figures, schools may try to improve on that criterion. To do so, a school must make the LSAT the primary (or sole) criterion for admission for more than 75 percent of its students. This is unfair to students who are more qualified (but did less well on the LSAT). It is also unfair to students who would have gotten more out of school if the selection process had been free of outside influence. And it is unfair to clients who would have gotten better representation if the law schools had been allowed to determine what criteria to use in deciding whom to admit. At present, law schools try to admit applicants that will make the best students and the best lawyers, and applicants who will add the most to the experience for other students and teachers. If any important ranking system uses the 25th percentile GPA or LSAT as a criterion, that will pull schools away from the goal of getting the best possible class of students. Students who should not go to a law school will be admitted and students who should go will be excluded, to the detriment of both students and society.
Using 75th percentile data, by contrast to the 25th, is much less harmful. The 75th percentile LSAT drives the admission for a much smaller portion of the class, only one quarter instead of three quarters. Notice that the bad effect of 25th percentile data does not depend on all rankings using that data, nor does it even depend on one ranking using it all of the time. As long as one important ranking might use it sometimes, schools that want to rank highly will increase their deference to the LSAT. When reading any ranking that is based in part on 25th percentile data (or overall averages), ask yourself whether you want all lawyers to be chosen from a list of persons who did well filling in the multiple-choice bubbles on one sheet of paper. If that would be irresponsible, then so is the ranking that leads, inexorably, to it.