Tom Bell (Chapman), U.S. News & World Report Improves Transparency of Law School Rankings:

Huzzah for U.S. News and World Report!  The most recent edition of its law school rankings includes the median LSAT and GPA of each school’s entering class.  [Unfortunately, the rankings table still sorts by 25th-75th percentiles; to get median LSAT and GPA data, you must click on each individual school, and then click on "More About Admissions"]…. Though USN&WR remains short of that ideal, disclosing median LSATs and GPAs represents a major step towards making the rankings more transparent and, thus, trustworthy.

USN&WR started the trend towards transparency last year, when it began publishing the “volume and volume equivalents” measures that it uses in its law school rankings….  There remain only two categories of data that USN&WR still uses in its law school rankings but does not disclose:  overhead expenditures/student (worth 9.75% of a school’s score in the rankings) and financial aid expenditures/student (worth 1.5%).  [Full methodology here]  It isn’t evident why USN&WR declines to publish those inputs, too, though perhaps the financial nature of the data raises special concerns.  If USN&WR cannot bring itself to publish overhead expenditures/student and financial aid expenditures/student, however, it should abandon those measures.  They serve as poor proxies for the quality of a school’s legal education and if we cannot double-check the figures we cannot trust their accuracy.