The National Jurist (March 2011): How Rankings Are Destroying Law Schools:

U.S. News & World’s Report’s annual rankings have fueled a moral tragedy — with law schools gaming, doctoring and now even lying about their numbers in an effort to improve their rankings. Does all of this chicanery amount to consumer fraud?

Villanova University School of Law sent a shock wave across legal education in January. The Roman Catholic university announced that it had knowingly reported false LSAT and GPA information to the ABA prior to 2010, apparently in an effort to impact its ranking in U.S. News & World Report. [TaxProf Blog coverage here, here, and here.] …

[W]hile some in legal academia were surprised that a school would stoop so low, most familiar with the impact U.S. News has had on law schools were only [surprised] the school’s chicanery was made public.

“All of us have heard rumors over the years about schools with numbers too good to be true,” said Paul Caron, a law professor at University of Cincinnati and an observer of legal education with his TaxProf Blog. “There is widespread suspicion that this is going on. It is not surprising to folks that eventually someone got caught.

Caron said that as pressure mounted on law school deans to perform well in the rankings, their actions to impact the numbers became more and more brazen. …

Caron said the ABA could make it impossible for schools to “game” the LSAT and GPA data. “With the technology as it is now, law schools and the LSAC know exactly what the LSAT scores are for every student. So it would not take a lot of effort to validate everyone’s reporting on this,” he said. …

Caron said legal education’s governing bodies should take action. “The ABA and the AALS have dropped the ball on this stuff,” he said. “For the exhorbitant fees they get, it is disappointing that they don’t do any auditing of the data. The ABA has consciously not wanted to assume this responsibility.”