The debate about the potential impact ofa possible change in the U.S. Newsmethodology for the upcoming law schools rankings continues to grow. Today, the Wall Street Journal weighs in with the front-page story "Law School Rankings Reviewed to Deter 'Gaming.'" The article offers up one analysis of the potential effect the inclusion of part-time students in the rankings data could have on the future of part-time law school programs.

Some background: In my blog post "Changing the Law School Ranking" Formula, we discussed the idea of combining both full-time and part-time entering student admission data for median LSAT scores and median undergraduate grade-point averages in the calculation of the school's ranking. Our current law school ranking methodology counts only full-time student data. Just to be clear, U.S. News is carefully contemplating the potential impact of such a methodology change; we will not make a decision until January 2009.





More...