. Forum

[BigJT]

From a quick glance, it looks like the initial variation dropped off pretty quickly and schools fell into a narrow range. A bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy -- making peer reputation an important part of your ranking system, and then providing peers with what is most likely the primary data point used for peer rankings is a pretty genius idea.

There was an article on Taxprof a little while back where they did a similar analysis of all schools. Found that most schools pretty much stay in a tight ranking range, regardless of what they try to do to increase their rankings.

[20141023]

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[04102014]

Although this doesn't really serve any purpose other than being interesting to look at, I gathered all of the past U.S. News & World Report data for the T14 and created a table showing all of the rankings over the years. I also created a simple graph which shows the minimum and maximum rankings of each of these schools, as well as each school's average ranking over the years. The spreadsheet can be accessed here:

U.S. News & World Report Rankings: The Top 14

You love making stuff like this, and I love you for it.

[Richie Tenenbaum]

I am not sure what the reason was, but there were no rankings from US news for 88 and 89. My guess is that after the released the first round in 87, there were a shit-ton of issues with their methodology or something and they decided to go back to the drawing boards to come up with a better system before rereleasing any more rankings. I am just making this up, but it is one of many possible reasons why there were no rankings for those 2 years.

Also, to answer the question about the "program" that I am using, I simply make all if this stuff in a Google Docs spreadsheet. It's basically the same thing as Excel except it is online and you can publish your sheets so that anyone can access them.

I believe the rankings were just not intended to be an annual event initially. More info here: http://www.prelawhandbook.com/law_schoo ... _1987_1999