Ranking of law schools based on CLAT student preference 2010

Last year after several periodicals published their law school rankings, I devised my own method of ranking Law schools, that takes in students through CLAT, based on student preference, this year I am back at the game.

So first the methodology – take average weighed rank of the general candidates who were offered seats in the first round of counseling. We only take the general quota and state general quota and first list as otherwise numerous distortions creep in and the preference data gets diluted by other factors. After taking the mean rank we look at standard deviation and look at diffraction quotient, in simpler terms we see how close to the mean the students opt for the same college, this way the number of seats would become immaterial. The only difference from last year is that this time around we would look at standard deviation rather than median (to find out the swing or the diffraction).

Getting the data from CLAT website fed into an excel sheet as shown in the image alongside, we get the mean rank of various colleges as follows: NLS 30.2728, NALSAR 131.077, NUJS 146.295, NLU-B 270.857, NLU-J 263.514, GNLU 597.138, NUALS 526.191, RMNLU 491.663, RGNUL 624.364, CNLU 630.5, HNLU 1054.593 (unprocessed data, containing the ranks is given in the table to the right).

Thus the colleges would be ranked in the following order NLS, NALSAR, NUJS, NLU-J, NLU-B, RMNLU, NUALS, GNLU, RGNUL, CNLU and HNLU.

If we see last year’s preference analysis we would find that the only change this year is that NLU-J edges past NLU-B, RMLNU moves ahead of NUALS and RGNUL pips CNLU. Below please find a comparison of this year's CLAT preference ranking and the ranking given by the commercial press, highlighted schools take students through CLAT.

From the minor changes in student preference we conclude that there hasn’t been a major upheaval in the law schools which would create a radical shift, unfortunately we can’t compare this data with that of NLU D, personally I hope that NLU D and ONLU would soon join the CLAT fold. Thus from a cumulative analysis of this year and last year’s students preference we find that as far as perception of students sitting for CLAT is concerned NLS is in the league of its own (Category I), catching it is NALSAR and NUJS (Category II), behind them is NLU J and NLU B (Category III), the rest of the law schools are in Category IV.