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| July 1, 2003
There is, alas, no reliable measure of teaching quality, even
though it is an issue that is, correctly, of great interest to prospective
students.? The closest we come (and it is not very close) are the
national surveys of student satisfaction with teaching conducted by the
Princeton Review conducted over the last half-dozen years or so.[1]?
This data can convey a spurious precision, which we have tried to eliminate
here by clustering the schools based on comparable scores (and where there
were natural breaks).? Listed here are only those schools with
top 50 faculties based on the 2003 reputational survey of leading
law professors.?? This means many schools which get very high marks for
teaching quality are omitted (examples are Western New England, New England,
Washburn, McGeorge, Baylor, and Maine).
The clusters at least bear some relation to what one hears anecdotally,
from faculty who have visited or taught at various schools and from students
who transfer.? (Yale is a bit of a mystery on this list, but the intimate
nature of the place compensates for what is not famously high-quality
teaching.)? But do take these results with a particularly large grain
of salt.
Outstanding Teaching Faculties (1-4)
| School |
Score |
|
Boston University |
3.62 |
|
University of Chicago |
3.60 |
|
University of Notre Dame |
3.54 |
|
University of Texas, Austin |
3.53 |
Strong Teaching Faculties (5-9)
| School |
Score |
|
College of William & Mary |
3.36 |
|
Cornell University |
3.32 |
|
University of Virginia |
3.35 |
|
Vanderbilt University |
3.33 |
|
Washington & Lee University |
3.39 |
Good Teaching Faculties (10-14)
| School |
Score |
|
American University |
3.16 |
|
Emory University |
3.17 |
|
University of California, Davis |
3.24 |
|
University of Southern California |
3.18 |
|
Yale University |
3.26 |
Adequate Teaching Faculties (15-50)
(the usual mix of good and bad teachers, nothing special on the
teaching front)
| School |
Score |
|
University of California, Hastings |
3.11 |
|
Washington University, St. Louis |
3.11 |
|
Georgetown University |
3.10 |
|
University of California, Los Angeles |
3.10 |
|
Rutgers University, Camden |
3.09 |
|
University of Illinois |
3.09 |
|
Cardozo Law School/Yeshiva University |
3.07 |
|
Chicago-Kent College of Law |
3.07 |
|
Columbia University |
3.07 |
|
Stanford University |
3.07 |
|
Duke University |
3.06 |
|
New York University |
3.06 |
|
Northwestern University |
3.06 |
|
University of Colorado, Boulder |
3.06 |
|
University of Iowa |
3.06 |
|
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor |
3.06 |
|
University of Pennsylvania |
3.06 |
|
Arizona State University |
3.05 |
|
Fordham University |
3.05 |
|
Harvard University |
3.05 |
|
Tulane University |
3.05 |
|
University of Arizona |
3.05 |
|
University of Minnesota |
3.05 |
|
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill |
3.05 |
|
University of Wisconsin, Madison |
3.05 |
|
George Mason University |
3.04 |
|
George Washington University |
3.04 |
|
Brooklyn Law School |
3.03 |
|
Rutgers University, Newark |
3.02 |
|
University of California, Berkeley |
3.02 |
|
University of Florida, Gainesville |
3.02 |
|
University of San Diego |
3.02 |
|
Boston College |
3.01 |
|
Indiana University, Bloomington |
3.01 |
|
Ohio State University |
3.00 |
|
University of Miami |
3.00 |
[1] An indication that these results
should be taken with a big grain of salt is the following note that I received
recently from a Chicago law student: "Most of us chose Chicago because
of the premium it supposedly put on teaching. But once we got there, we
found that very few of our teachers are really gifted or really spend time
thinking about what they want to accomplish in class. The law school mentality
that 'one day you will be a lawyer and you will have to be able to do this,
so do it now, without any instruction, even though you just started law
school last week' blows my mind. They have this idea that if they actually
teach us anything, it would be holding our hands and spoon-feeding (to use
the two common metaphors) and those are definite no-no's. Most of them have
no concept of a middle ground; they are rarely explicit about what we are
supposed to be learning; and few of them know how to use questioning to
progress to a teaching point. Then half the time they give us exams that
don't correspond to what we did in class. And rest assured, they never would
stoop to giving us an idea of what they want on an exam, even though they
may have very definite expectations which they do not intend to bend."
Alas, I have some colleagues at Texas with the same ignorant attitudes
about pedagogy, but I can report that a majority of Texas professors know
that "holding hands" and "spoon-feeding" are really
just the names that incompetent teachers give to meaningful teaching.
Lest anyone think, wrongly, that feedback from one student discredits
the Princeton Review results, let me hasten to add that perspectives differ.
Another Chicago law student, for example, writes: "I would rate the teaching
quality of my professors so far very highly. Although I am in no position
to compare my experience directly with the experiences of other law students,
I can state that, in my opinion, the teaching quality at Chicago has been
significantly higher on average than the quality of the teaching at my
high school, college, and graduate school- and not by default, because
I had some wonderful teachers at each of those other schools. Teaching
quality at Chicago stands above those other schools, in my estimation,
in large part because the teaching has more consistently been at that
very high level!" So there you have it. Take the PR results with a grain
of salt, and talk to students at the schools you're considering.
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