Interrogating US News Rankings

The Wall Street Journal offered an article (link in the title to this post) on criticisms of the U.S. News rankings, and some alternatives. Just to make a short cut for OOTJ readers, here are some links from the article:

Law Firm Addict - polling law students on their law school's summer associate placements

and

Law Clerk Addict - polling law students on their school's judicial clerkship placements.

Of course, OOTJ readers are probably already aware of Prof. Brian Leiter's

Leiter Rankings - which looks at scholarly rep in different ways and also lists clerkship placements.

Then the article includes links to lots of alternative measures of law school value. I still would argue that the rankings miss other values that I see in the schools I have worked at (Suffolk in Boston and St. Louis U. in guess where) or attended (U.KY), or heard about from many friends and relations. Quality of teaching is something difficult to quantify. I don't know that I'd recommend using Rate My Professor, but there isn't much else that talks about profs' teaching.