Let’s See Who’s Who in the Zoo

Student blogger:
Mike Preciado (’13)
Chapman Law Review Editor

Have you ever wondered how absurd the law school rankings are? Well, they’re absolutely bonkers. No, I’m not complaining that they produce unfortunate results for some law schools: by definition, a ranking system will always have schools in the lowest tier. I’m complaining because the methodology in which law schools are ranked is through indirect measurements like reputation, peer assessment, or student-faculty ratios.

My main gripe is that students at different law schools never directly academically compete with each other while in law school—not once. Law students are judged before they enter law school with their LSAT scores and college GPA. They are also judged after law school with job placement scores and bar passage rates. But they don’t ever actually directly compete while in law school against other school’s law students—it’s all just speculation (if you’re familiar with college football, the law school ranking system is just a worse off version of the BCS ranking system). Imagine you’re an excellent high school sprinter and just got recruited into a top ranked college for track and field. But at your college, you never compete against any other sprinter at another school. Whether you win or lose your race is determined, not by actual competition, but through indirect measurements like your high school sprint times or the reputation of your college for producing fast student athletes. That’s exactly how law schools compete.

If you’re going to rank my school (based on the students who go there), then let the students actually compete against other students from different schools. No, I’m not talking about some Royal Rumble or being locked in the Hunger Games—although that would be entertaining. What I imagine is some competition team where the top ranked students from each school compete by taking anonymously graded exams. Law Reviews already contain the top students from every school and could easily be converted into academic competition teams. It’s easy to envision. Competitors would be given two weeks notice of what subject would be tested, would fly to some host law school, would all take the exam at the same time, and then impartial professors would grade the exams. We could even make it more objective by throwing in multiple-choice questions. Easy as that! We have Moot Court teams, why don’t we have academic competition teams? The great thing about Moot Court competitions is that it’s not just the Top 14 schools that do well. Any school, at any given time, can advance in any given tournament. My speculation is that this would be the same for academic competitions. Indeed, do law students at Stanford write exams completely different from mine? Are they that much better at test taking? We use the same books, use the same supplements, write in the same IRAC format, and take the same type of tests. I believe there would be little difference between the grades of a top-ranked Stanford student and one from a top-ranked Chapman student.

So why am I advocating for this? Because I’m feisty. Lawyers like to compete, so let law students compete! (“C’mon ref, let the boys play!”) I want to see who’s who in the zoo. Imagine if you went to a lower ranked school and scored the highest exam compared to every other competitor in the nation. Don’t you think that would open up doors? More importantly, wouldn’t that raise serious doubts about the current ranking system? I think it would. It would force judges and employers to take a second look at the actual skills and abilities of candidates regardless of the ranking of their school.

I believe that competition is a discovery procedure. It’s a method of natural selection that determines who performs best. Most law schools already make their own individual students compete against each other with strict curves and class rank. This is just the natural extension of that.

So I offer this challenge to any Top 50 ranked school: I’ll assemble a team and you assemble a team and we’ll go head-to-head. Will ranking determine the winner? Maybe we’ll win and maybe we won’t. But I would rather lose actually playing the game than lose sitting on the sidelines.

The views expressed in the student blogs are those of the author and not the law school.