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Good or bad, it seems almost everyone has something to say about law school rankings. One of the primary flaws of rankings, however, is that they dictate what is important by assigning weight to different categories. When algorithms and methodologies behind rankings change, or when new rankings are created, it is often with the purpose of adjusting the importance of the metrics that go into them to make them better or more meaningful to the people who are looking at those rankings. But no matter what changes are made, there are certain value assumptions that are decided for you—for example, a rankings system might decide that median UGPA is worth 10% of their ranking while bar passage rate is worth only 2%. These value assumptions are what create the rankings that are published—but there is almost no chance that they line up in perfect symmetry with your own priorities. In fact, it's highly likely that they do not in multiple categories.
We want law school applicants to be able to order and select schools based on what is important to them, not what's important to someone else. So, we are in the process of creating a tool that does just that — that allows you, the user, to choose how to weight each metric, and then see the resulting rankings which are customized to your own personal priorities. It will also feature a search function where you can filter the results to include only metrics within a certain range (e.g., only schools in the state of New York, or with median LSAT scores between 165 and 168), and a comparison feature to look at a narrower set of schools' data side-by-side. Here are a few screenshots (below).
We expect an August 1 release, and everything will be free. There won’t be extra portals with hidden data you have to pay to access, and there never will be. We hope this tool will be helpful for law school applicants at all stages of their application process.
