Congrats to the University of Illinois-Chicago John Marshall Law School on an unprecedented USNWR peer score improvement

USNWR peer scores are notoriously sticky. That said, one of the greatest ways to improve peer score is to change names. Michigan State, Penn State, New Hampshire, and Texas A&M, among others, have all benefited from acquiring a law school and changing the name to the more prominent research institution. Granted, schools improve in many respect with such a change—more financial backing, more resources poured into the institution, often new leadership and new faculty.

But one thing that we can observe is the year-to-year change in peer reputation scores. USNWR surveys about 800 law faculty around the country with a slightly better than 70% response rate. They rate law schools on a scale of 1 to 5. Even after these schools names changed, however, their peer scores did not immediately and rapidly change—the peer scores improved, at best, 0.2 points per year after that before leveling off.

In the entire history of USNWR peer surveys, just once have I observed an increase of 0.3 peer score in a year: the year after USNWR misreported the name of Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and the school dropped 0.3 points, it rose 0.3 points in the following year.

But the University of Illinois-Chicago (John Marshall), as printed by USNWR, has set a new record: it improved from 1.7 last year (when it was labeled “The John Marshall Law School”), to 2.1 this year. That’s also good enough (at least in part) to bring it from the “rank not published” tier to 140th overall.

The lawyers and judges survey is a three-year average of responses. That score rose from 2.6 to 2.7. We’ll see in two more years if the three-year average improves dramatically.

To be sure, more resources and new programs will be features at UIC brings John Marshall in. But peers reacted very positively in just one year to this new name.