Icechicken's 2017 Law School Rankings Forum

[cal.trask]

I'm just confused. How can there be any serious feedback if the ranking algorithm is not posted here ? The list itself is meaningless without the criteria. I can provide a completely different list with my own taste of, say, the names of the schools, which are of course publicly available information...and without pointing out my criteria, I could've posted a thread just like this..

That proprietary, dude. You can’t just give that sort of thing away.

[BlendedUnicorn]

Run the original criteria on a few random schools instead of just t13* ones and see if you get absurd results. That will tell you a lot about the "objectivity" of your formula.


*lol

[ddevich]

Am I the only one that seems to realize that this is a complete farce with random rankings, a deadpan delivery, and a dedicated and rather deceptive OP?

I mean, his second set of rankings made one school jump 12 spots. The numbers are random, the criteria is non existent, and it seems painfully obvious to me.

It's been funny watching people respond to the OP with any level of seriousness in their evaluation of his methodology.

[KENYADIGG1T]

Thread of the year. This is my first year on TLS; are there any end-of-the-year awards?

[cavalier1138]

My attempt at cracking the methodology works for the very top and bottom bands (except stanford I suppose).

1. Harvard 1636/1817
2. Yale 1701/1824
3. Columbia 1754/1858
4. Penn 1740/1850
5. Michigan 1817/1859
6. Duke 1838/1868
7. Berkeley 1868/1894
8. Cornell 1865/1887
9. Chicago 1890/1902
10. Northwestern 1851/1859
11. NYU 1831/1835
12. Virginia 1819/1819
12T. Stanford 1893/1893

(Rankings based on the number of years between the founding of the university and the founding of the law school--which are the two numbers beside each school.)

Nailed it.

[icechicken]

Am I the only one that seems to realize that this is a complete farce with random rankings, a deadpan delivery, and a dedicated and rather deceptive OP?

I resent that implication.

The original system was quite simple:

(# of national football championships) + (# of national basketball championships)*.1

This seems to work pretty well, and I think the above are plausible measures of overall institutional strength and most importantly are completely objective and outcome-based, but, as I conceded earlier, the system seemed unfair to the New York schools and heavily favored Michigan.

The new system is rather more complicated:

47.45% weighting for: # of national fencing championships (FC)
39.20% weighting for: # of national football championships (FC2)
9.80% weighting for: # of Nobel Laureates affiliated with the university (NL) (self-reported data by the universities, which I concede may be flawed)
3.55% weighting for: # of national championships in any sport (TC). This has the effect of double-counting football and fencing, of course, so I adjusted the coefficients accordingly.

Yes, including regional schools would make this system go completely sideways. The problem, of course, is that so many variables themselves correlate with age and "prestige" (HYP solidified their reputation as the "Big Three" by dominating 19th-century football) that it is fairly easy to make anything up. This is how Cooley ranks themselves into the top ten, or how seemingly every law school has found their way into one of the "specialized" USNWR lists.

My sincere apologies to anyone who feels that I wasted their time by suggesting such an outlandish paradigm but I do feel that much of the discussion that resulted was valuable.

ETA: I appreciate sev's efforts - they found another two things that more-or-less result from a university being older.

[NavyNuke]

Fantastic.

[cavalier1138]

You're a monster. I hate you.

[Platopus]

A+ trolling. Good shit.

[A. Nony Mouse]

Something something Poe’s law. Don’t troll.