So, I’ve got wine on the brain. Mrs. Sherpa and I recently spent a long weekend in the Napa Valley tasting wine and enjoying some time away from the craziness of life.
Since I’ve been back the Freakonomics blog has posted several times on the blind tasting of wine and how most people can’t really tell the difference between a $10 bottle and a $150 one. The discussion is infused with some interesting studies on the topic and, Levitt’s ultimate conclusion that the more you know about wine the more you end up spending on it.
I was swishing this idea around in my head when I read this choice quote from the Case Western Law Dean criticizing the U.S. News law school rankings:
[I]t seems beyond debate that it is truly depressing that law deans, who have so many important educational issues to address, feel the pressure they undeniably feel to make important decisions about their schools in response to a popular magazine’s educationally unsophisticated decisions about ranking methodology.
Read the whole piece. It’s good, if not real original (at least for those of us critical of the rankings). The fact that his piece is, in part, a response to a U.S. News proposal to count the entry credentials of evening students in rankings is for another post. What seems to be lacking in these rankings is a more personal, less manipulable way to measure law school quality.
So why don’t we do what the prominent wine critics do - line up a bunch of glasses, do a blind tasting, and rate purely based on the taste of the wine? The critics supposedly do not know the producer of the wine or its vintage. Just it’s type (syrah, merlot, etc.).
As part of the U.S. News calculation I propose appointing a panel of experts - legal scholars, judges, attorneys, etc - and have them take several steps to measure the quality of education. This panel could listen to classes without knowing who is teaching or at what school, but it would know the area of law. Rate based on overall quality of instruction, discussion, etc. The panel might also read law review articles or student papers to gauge the quality of scholarship being done and promoted at the school.
Perhaps I still have some tannin residue in my brain, but it strikes me that adding a component like this (not to mention Dr. Bombay’s law school value calculation) could help to bring a more personal, less manipulable component to the rankings. Or maybe the U.S. News team just needs a nice Napa Cab when they’re tabulating the rankings.
