Did 16 law schools commit rankings malpractice via disclosures to U.S. News & World Report?

That is the question posed by TaxProf Blog. The 16 schools disclosed figures for the percentage of their students who were employed at graduation, even though they would have been better off allowing the magazine to make an automatic calculation instead.

“Many of these schools undoubtedly adversely affected their overall ranking by reporting their employed at graduation data to U.S. News,” TaxProf blog says.

U.S. News collects figures on students employed nine months after graduation, a number also collected by the ABA, and students employed at graduation, a number the ABA does not collect.

When a law school fails to report how many of its graduates are employed at graduation, U.S. News will assign a number that is 30 percentage points less than the number of the school's graduates employed nine months later. Sixteen schools reported employment-at-graduation numbers that were more than 30 percentage points lower than their nine-month figures.

Last year, 23 schools would have likely been better off keeping their employment-at-graduation numbers a secret.