A national magazine that has consistently ranked SIU’s School of Law as a third-tier school was forced last week to issue a correction to its survey for the second time in two years.

Each year, U.S. News and World Report ranks the top 50 law schools and groups the remaining schools in second, third and fourth tiers. The error affected rankings among the top 50 schools both years.

Dean Thomas Guernsey called the rankings “misleading,” and said he is not surprised U.S. News and World Report made a mistake again this year.

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“U.S. News does a serious disservice to potential law school applicants,” he said.

“I think they fail to take into account serious differences among schools that could be meaningful to particular applicants.”

His concerns are shared by 163 other law school deans across the country who recently endorsed a letter titled “Law School Rankings May Be Hazardous to You Health.” The letter is being distributed to prospective law school students by the Law School Admission Council.

In addition to SIU, the letter was endorsed by the law school deans of top-ranked Yale University, No. 3 Stanford University, No. 12 Northwestern University, and No. 20 University of Illinois.

The letter says that students are being misled if they treat law school rankings as a competent and conscientious presentation of the limited information they purport to convey.

But Bob Morse, senior editor of the U.S. News graduate school rankings, said the criticisms of the deans are invalid.

If we were doing this to do what the law school deans wanted us to do, then we wouldn’t do it, he said.

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We’re not doing the rankings for an audience of 164 law school deans. That’s not the main audience. It’s obviously an audience, but it’s not the audience.

The Association of American Law Schools had a press conference in New York Feb. 18, at which it released a study challenging the validity of the magazine’s rating system.

AALS officials said the study found “many serious problems” with the way U.S. News evaluates law schools.

In a press release issued by the AALS, John Sexton, dean of the New York University School of Law, called the rankings “misleading and dangerous.”

“First, a ranking system inherently assumes that every applicant has identical needs and desires, an assumption I am certain, that U.S. News editors would not make about magazines,” Sexton said.

When ranking law schools the magazine considers selectivity; LSAT scores; acceptance rates; reputation among academics, attorney and judges; and overall bar pass rate of students.

Guernsey said the magazine’s study is flawed because it does not take into account such things as curriculum, clinical experience, faculty quality and faculty-student ratios.

“For instance, our school has a very high-quality faculty, he said. That doesn’t get measured at all.”

“We also have probably the best student-faculty ratio in the country at 13 or 14 to one, when that of the rest of the country is 22 to one.”

Guernsey said the magazine’s methodology is invalid, but its rankings are among the most popular of all the rankings published each year.

“It won’t go away because U.S. News sells a lot of magazines,” he said.

Guernsey said law schools receive questionnaires from the magazine each year. If schools do not return the questionnaires, U.S. News estimates the information.

For instance, Guernsey said the SIU School of Law does a survey of its graduates to determine whether or not they’re employed. “You never get a perfect rate of return on those surveys,” he said.

“What U.S. News does is, those people who haven’t responded to the survey, they make an assumption that only a certain percentage of them have jobs.

Morse responded to Guernsey’s criticism by saying:One of the variables that U.S. News uses in the rankings, that accounts for 6 percent of the model, is the at-graduation employment rate, which isn’t published. Around a quarter of the schools don’t turn in that number, and for those quarters we make an estimate for the tone data point for them.

Guernsey said he does not consider any rankings a reliable source of information. There are other sources though, such as The Official Guide to Law Schools, published by the Law School Admissions Council, that provide basic information about law schools and do not rely on rankings.

Morse said U.S. News only wants to assist prospective law students with choosing a school.

We feel that we’re providing a valuable service to give them some information that they can use in their decision to determine the relative merits of law schools, he said.