Otherwise Occupied - usf

Spring 2008 CALIs are posted

gregh — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 10:45:37 -0500

Outside the registrar's office, if you're interested. As usual, I'm not going to post them. They'll be online in due course.

(My last semester of waiting only to be disappointed. It's one thing when you get an A and don't get one -- a handful of people get As every semester -- but you really get your hopes up when you get an A+. Yes, I know this will result in a huge pity party for me...)

Impact of USF's new curve

gregh — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:15:01 -0500

So, what's the impact of USF's new, unnecessary, inflated curve?

Obviously, it has greatly increased GPAs, which stands to reason. However, it should also be clear how much the altered curve will disadvantage those who have less opportunity to make use of it.

This year's 2nd-year part-timers had an entire first year under the harsher curve, but their class ranking will be negatively impacted during recruiting because, for ranking purposes, they'll be bunched in with students who have had an entire, full-time first-year under the new curve.

This year's 4th-year part-timers like me entered this year, with the gentler curve, with fewer units to take (and one semester entirely scheduled, even if we wanted to do something about it) before graduation.

All told, slipstreaming such a massive change in on everyone else with no method of correcting for the changes is wildly unfair. Next spring, when this year's 2nd-year part-timers are in the same pool as this year's first-year full-timers for rank, what are they going to tell employers who couldn't care less about GPAs (most of them) when their rank is lower, because they had a tougher curve?

The administration claimed they did this immediately because it was the best solution. I think it's pretty clear that they actually did it because it was the expedient solution. Well, they got what they wanted. People have higher GPAs. Yay.

USF School of Law Class Percentile Ranks by GPA - Spring 2008

gregh — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 18:15:24 -0500

This table shows the breakdown of percentile ranks by GPA for the University of San Francisco School of Law as of the Spring 2008 semester, i.e., as of the end of the 2007-2008 school year.

	5%	10%	15%	20%	25%	33 1/3%	40%	50%	60%	80%
1FT & 1PT = 236	3.63 & above	3.46 - 3.62	3.38 - 3.45	3.31 - 3.37	3.20 - 3.30	3.09 - 3.19	3.02 - 3.08	2.87 - 3.01	2.71 - 2.86	2.38 - 2.70

2FT, 2PT & 3PT = 228	3.55 & above	3.42 - 3.54	3.33 - 3.41	3.21 - 3.32	3.16 - 3.20	3.06 - 3.15	2.99 - 3.05	2.84 - 2.98	2.75 - 2.83	2.55 - 2.74

3FT, 4FT & 4PT = 217	3.54 & above	3.43 - 3.53	3.38 - 3.42	3.29 - 3.37	3.23 - 3.28	3.15 - 3.22	3.07 - 3.14	3.01 - 3.06	2.93 - 3.00	2.72 - 2.92

Because bar passage rate doesn't matter.

gregh — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 13:59:04 -0600

On our class mailing list, a correspondent responded to the news of our decline in the rankings like this:

WTF. We have the 4th highest bar passage rate in California...

Bar passage rate doesn't really matter. In effect, all that matters is that your graduates are employed -- not that they can practice -- and that your name resonates with those answering surveys about 200 law schools spread throughout the country. (Wait and see. UC Irvine will have sky-high reputation rankings as soon as US News includes them, even though they will have little academic output and respondents will have little if any exposure to their grads.)

Bar passage rate is a minuscule part (2%) of the ranking index. What's more, the data that US News uses lags, so our numbers wouldn't be affected by last year's bar passage rate, which may have been anomalous, in any case. The largest component of the ranking index is the so-called "quality assessment," which is based on the surveys sent to law school deans, professors, judges, and practitioners. We don't do particularly well on that front, and that certainly impacts our ranking. I haven't seen the actual numbers, but I've read some reports that suggest our reputation score dropped, while Santa Clara's climbed, which explains why they jumped way up while we fell.

Unfortunately, the reputation numbers -- despite what US News claims -- appear to be readily swayed by marketing, the "law porn" that is sent out. After reputation, placement statistics come into play. We've had enough churn in the administrative side of the school that there are lots of things that can explain what happened, both in marketing and in collecting and reporting placement stats.

Fortunately, it doesn't really matter. Reputation informs the rankings in the short term, but the rankings are only going to inform reputation in the long term, as churn in the legal community from those obsessed by the rankings go into the world with their notions of who's good and who's bad. Whatever reputation we had yesterday is likely to be the reputation we'll have as we go off into the community. (Of course, it also makes it very difficult and expensive to increase reputation score.)

How do you decrease your law school's ranking?

gregh — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 00:57:29 -0600

I don't know exactly. But it's clear -- it actually is very clear looking at the methodology -- that increasing bar passage rate isn't much help. Of the USF-competitive California schools, Santa Clara up, USD down but still T2, McGeorge up, and Pepperdine way up.

Leiter asks that bloggers not reveal actual rankings. Not hard to do when you're posting about a school that's unranked, as it fell back into T3.

See here.

There are many possible reasons for this to happen. When KU plunged several years ago, the fingers were pointed at the changing of the guard at career services; we've had similar changes at USF. However, it's really the reputation numbers that can be painful, and they're the most meaningful. After all, they reflect what drives employers to USF (or affect employers who post that, even with years of experience, you must come from a top-ranked law school.) And that just keeps cycling, as future reputation is driven both by those who enter the profession and the lingering shadows of past reputations.

Oh well.

CALI Awards

gregh — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 15:52:54 -0600

Last time I checked, CALI (Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction) hadn't updated the CALI awards listing on their site. That seems to have changed.

For example, USF School of Law CALI Awards since 1999.

(I get probably a search hit a day on this, despite the fact that I've never posted lists of CALI winners.)

USF First-Time Bar Passage By Rank Quintile updated

gregh — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 21:32:19 -0600

I've updated the bar passage by quintile table.

Curious detail. According to the CalBar statistics, there were 188 first-time takers from USF in 2007 (22 February and 166 July). There are only 165 in the table. Did 23 members of earlier classes wait to take the bar exam? In 2006, there were 214 (15 February and 199 July) first-time takers, and the school listed only 200. Are they only counting July takers?

USF School of Law Class Percentile Ranks by GPA - Fall 2007

gregh — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 23:25:10 -0600

	5%	10%	15%	20%	25%	33 1/3%	40%	50%	60%	80%
1FT & 1PT = 241	3.660 & above	3.553 - 3.659	3.393 - 3.552	3.250 - 3.392	3.200 - 3.249	3.100 - 3.199	3.040 - 3.099	2.880 - 3.039	2.707 - 2.879	2.300 - 2.706

2FT, 2PT & 3PT = 232	3.515 & above	3.388 - 3.514	3.279 - 3.387	3.205 - 3.278	3.095 - 3.204	2.975 - 3.094	2.893 - 2.974	2.810 - 2.892	2.670 - 2.809	2.435 - 2.669

3FT, 4FT & 4PT = 233	3.500 & above	3.419 - 3.499	3.330 - 3.418	3.266 - 3.329	3.212 - 3.265	3.080 - 3.211	3.027 - 3.079	2.960 - 3.026	2.869 - 2.959	2.673 - 2.868

For a fun exercise, check out the 1L differences from Fall 2006 (under the old curve) under the new curve.

Rumor: USF July 2007 California Bar Exam First-Time Pass Rate: 85%

gregh — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 01:57:10 -0600

UPDATE: Confirmed!

So, I've heard from three different students (or alumni) who've heard from professors or administrators that USF's first-time pass rate for the California Bar Exam was 85% -- actually, one report was 84%.

It's a nice surprise, but there is some reason to it. First, the class of 2007 entered in the most competitive law school admissions cycle ever. The class that entered in 2004 remains the highest ever for LSAT takers and law school applications nationally. Second, maybe reflective of that, it was also the highest overall pass rate for the California Bar Exam.

If we really hit 84% or 85% and everyone else didn't match, we'll be in good company.

Wireless insecurity: a reminder

gregh — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 16:21:50 -0500

Last summer, ZiefBrief reported that wireless was coming to the library. There was a note in that article: "(Our helpful Law IT staff ask us to remind you that, wireless being wireless, it will never be 100% secure. So please don't us it for your online banking and such!)"

I commented with some of my thoughts about why that was important. Our public networking uses a wildly insecure method for authenticating users and authorizing access. The first, most obvious problem is that no wireless encryption is used. All communications with the wireless network are in the clear, and anyone within range can watch your traffic. Second, there's no authentication of the wireless network; that is, there's no way for the user to know that the "USFWireless" SSID they connect to is, in fact, USFWireless. Finally, because there is no authentication of the wireless network and no wireless network authorization, authentication to the public network happens by means of a jail, which is opened by means of a form on an apparent transparent HTTP proxy.

Why is that a concern? Rather than redirect the request to an authentication host with an appropriate, properly sign TLS (nee SSL) certificate, the request is simply hijacked. Users are lulled into accepting these poorly signed certificates as a regular part of getting online. It becomes second nature to ignore those warnings, and I'm sure many do. That opens up a prime opportunity for a man-in-the-middle attack. Even if you send all of your traffic across an encrypted channel, if you get to the point you simply accept "bad" certificates, you no longer know who is watching your data.

This came to mind today as I was reading this article from the Washington Post. It describes new, automated tools for sniffing credentials from the "wire" and using them to connect to common online services. Similar attacks on USFConnect (the university intranet) aren't hard to imagine. It's never been particularly hard to pull this off; it's just that now folks are demonstrating automated tools to do the job.

And so, this is a gentle reminder to watch the certificates you're granted while you're surfing online. Be careful with the information you send around on insecure wireless networks, and that especially includes relatively public places like the law school. Perhaps one of these days, the IT folks will see fit to strengthen the protections; it's not hard, but the user support can be daunting. For the time being, wireless continues to be unsafe, even though its use can be a calculated risk.