Five years ago, I pointed out that the ordinal ranking at the heart of the USNWR rankings is perhaps one of its greatest deceptions. It crunches its formula and spits out a score. That score is normalized to give the top-scoring school (Yale) a score of 100, and it scales the rest of the scores off that.

But the magazine then chooses to display rank order of each school--even if there are significant gaps between the scores. To highlight one such example this year, Vanderbilt has a score of 80, USC has a score of 79, and Florida has a score of 73, which suggest that Vanderbilt and USC are quite close and that Florida is somewhat farther behind those two (even if in overall elite company!). But the magazine displays this as Vanderbilt tied for 17, USC 20, and Florida 21--distorting the narrow gap between Vanderbilt and USC, and the much wider gap between them and Florida. And even though the magazine displays the overall score, the ordinal ranking drowns out these scores. Indeed, as the rankings are ordinal, there is no space from one school to the next, suggesting that they are placed along an equal line.

This plays out elsewhere in the rankings, as law students agonize over small differences in ordinal ranking that belie fairly distinct clumpings of schools that suggest little difference--indeed, in many cases, differences likely only the result of rounding the raw score up or down to the next whole number.

Assuming one takes the USNWR formula seriously--which it doesn't even appear USNWR does, given its choice to rank--a better way would be to visualize the relative performance of each school based on the score, not assigning each school an ordinal rank. That provides better context about the relative position of schools to one another. And that can help illustrate sharp differences in the overall score, or groupings that illustrate a high degree of similarity between a number of schools.

Below is my attempt to visualize the rankings in that fashion. (Please note that this may look best on a desktop browser due to the size of the chart.)