Something About The Law

Shambo Nandy, part of a group of students and faculty from NUJS that has preferred a complaint against the purportedly flawed Law School rankings in India Today and Outlook to the Press Council of India, explains the reasons for the same.

At NUJS, we had hoped that the 2010 rankings in different magazines would give us good reviews particularly because of our recent achievements which includes the following:

• Hiring of new and experienced faculty
• NUJS winning the internationally reputed ELSA Moot and also the NLS arbitration moot for the third time in a row besides winning other moots.
• There being unprecedented research output by NUJS faculty with many of them publishing in peer reviewed journals with a high international impact factor.
• NUJS Law Review being ranked twice as the best law review of the country.

Hence, we had fairly expected that our rankings would improve majorly (in the case of India Today) or at best would remain the same (in the case of Outlook). Now, when the rankings were published (both of them coming out in the June 28, 2010 edition of India Today and Outlook) we were crestfallen and some of us were very angry with the dismal rankings that we got.

Most national law schools are run to a great extent by its students and as a consequence the development of a national law school depends largely on the quality of students who came in. Hence, we were worried that CLAT aspirants who tend to rely on such rankings will not give higher preference to NUJS.

Since Prof Shamnad Basheer had expended considerable amount of time gathering the data and sending them he was also greatly perturbed by the rankings. One day when he told me and Debanshu that he was looking for a team who could do some research for him in relation to the rankings we were more than willing to do it because we were also greatly dissatisfied with the gross inaccuracies and methodological flaws.

While researching we found out that not only NUJS but many other law schools were given lower marks than what they deserved. It was then that we thought of writing a generalized letter that would highlight the faulty methodology that these surveys employed.

We found out the following flaws:

1. Points/Weightage for “Selection Process”- All the leading national law schools conducted the very same joint entrance exam (CLAT) to select candidates and the entire process is overseen through a common committee (viz. CLAT Committee, consisting of heads of all law schools), but Outlook gave them different points under the head “selection process”.

2. “Academic Excellence” given relatively lower marks/weightage- A severe methodological flaw was the fact that colleges were marked on “288” under the category “Selection Process”, whereas the total marks/weightage given to “Academic Excellence” was only 200. Academic Excellence of a college is a more important criterion than selection process and hence merited higher weightage as the college’s functioning depends on it.

3. Discrepancies in marks allotted for placements- It was rather strange that NLSIU which had the best placements overall was given lower marks (139.3) than NALSAR (148.5).

4. Faculty Performance Not Taken Into Account- Faculty performance is critical to the reputation of any educational establishment. But Outlook did not consider this in their rankings. This is despite the fact that they had asked for various data relating to faculty performance and we had accordingly sent in all these details, including faculty publications.

5. Influence of Advertisement- We were very concerned of the prospect of sponsorships and paid advertisements influencing individual rankings. This was more so because even NUJS had received such an offer to advertise in Outlook for varying rates starting from Rs. 1,00,000 and going up to Rs. 5,00,000. We also found out that any college that had advertised in that issue in any of these magazines had only seen its ranking improve relative to the previous year or at the least remained the same.

6. Sudden drop in rankings- Colleges may drop or gain ranks year after year. However, any sudden drop in rankings must surely have some causal demonstrable link. NUJS was ranked second in 2009 and ranked fifth in 2010. Potential reasons for a drop in rankings such as this could have been that some of the star faculty left, or that there were no significant achievements by students, or significant research output by the faculty, etc. But in all these areas, NUJS performed exceptionally well in the year 2009-10. There was also no demonstrable link to also show that other law schools got better than NUJS during the period under survey.

7. Risk of Inflated Data- The market survey agency sent out a questionnaire to every college and they were marked on the basis of the responses that the colleges sent them. However, we have reason to believe that the data sent by the law schools was not independently verified by the agency since the data sent by NUJS was also not further verified. Without independent verification, there is unbridled scope for the individual colleges to send inflated and glossy data.

8. Overall methodological flaws and lack of transparency in the survey- We found out that Outlook used three different agencies to rank different colleges over the past few years. The criterion adopted in the different years was different, without any accompanying explanations for the changed methodology or why a particular methodology/heads were preferred over others in the first place. Illustratively, in 2008, the respondents were asked to rate institutes on the basis of “faculty competence” and “pedagogic systems”, where in 2010, “faculty competence” was dropped as an indicator altogether. The 2008 survey methodology explains that 120 people were interviewed. However, the Outlook issue did not elaborate on who these 120 people were, what cross section of the legal sector did they represent and how qualified were they to express a view in this regard. Similarly, in 2009, the methodology explains that experts were asked to rate the colleges, but does not mention as to who these experts are or the broad nature of their institutional affiliations and what specific legal sector they represented.

Based on the above, we demanded that Outlook released all the data that the survey agency had procured from the various law schools in relation to the questionnaire that was circulated with a direction to also elaborate the ranking methodology in greater detail and why certain criteria were chosen and weighted.

We had given them one week to send us their reply and since they had failed to do so, we have now filed a complaint with the Press Council of India under the Press Council (Procedure for Inquiry) Regulations, 1979.

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Tags: Legal Education