A number of sources have been critical of our Best Law School ranking since it was released on February 8th. Almost all of this criticism is related to the use of data from RateMyProfessor.com, a website where students can grade their professors.

When we were deciding which data to use to represent student satisfaction, we carefully compared the Princeton Review and RateMyProfessor scores. In the aggregate, we found a strong correlation between the two studies.

However, some have now reported that the website includes non-law school faculty and former faculty. We did an initial search of the website and found that this was true for at least a few schools.

We are now in the process of reviewing the data for every school, searching by individual professor currently on staff. We hope to have this review done by Feb. 19, at which time we will make any necessary corrections to ensure a fair and accurate study. If we find that the RateMyProfessor inaccuracies are significant and prevalent, we will consider removing it as a data source from the study.

However, we believe that the voice of students is essential to any ranking that is designed to identify the best schools for students, and we feel we have put together a thoughtful and important ranking.

Our primary goal is to help students and prospective law students with useful and accurate data. This requires us to use reliable data and has prompted this time-consuming review of the RateMyProfessor data.

We will make any corrections in both the digital and iPad version of the magazine as soon as we complete this review, and we will list all corrections on our web site. We will also publish any corrections in the March print issue of the magazine.

As a company, we are committed to producing the highest level of journalism. We clearly failed in this case to take due care to ensure adequate quality of the RateMyProfessor data. We apologize for this mistake and are taking corrective action now, and will institute changes to ensure this kind of mistake does not repeat. 

While we have only heard directly from three schools so far, we appreciate reader feedback and ask that you communicate any concerns with me directly so that we can look into the matter and address them promptly.

Jack Crittenden


Editor In Chief


Jack@Cypressmagazines.com