Lawctopus Law Student Happiness Index poll 2

Lawctopus through a student poll, in its second week questions law students, “What is the most important thing which determines your happiness in law school? 210 students casted their vote, which led to reveal 26 percent, chose placements and a good 17 percent chose faculty. Further Lawctopus reveals flaws in Outlook’s Law School Rankings 2010..“Don’t Know, Don’t Care” attitude of Outlook’s magazines Law School Rankings 2010:.Come May and every CLAT (Common Law Admission Test) aspirant will be sweaty courtesy of the summer and the hard work. Inevitably he/she will be flanked by sweaty (and working equally hard for CLAT) parents with puckered faces and sweaty brows who are more worried than the aspirant..CLAT will, after all, decide their child’s future. Parents generally do their research on the CLAT’ law schools very well and will be able to speak of the National Law Universities, the infrastructure and the salary packages with an air of confidence..The law school will, after all, decide their child’s happiness..Magazines like Outlook do well (and make good money) by preying upon this cat-like curiosity-and an oxygen-like-need of parents and students who want to find exactly about “who-is-who” in legal education. The surveys and rankings sell like hot cakes and are not digested well by the law schools that are ranked low..Do the parents know what their children want? And do the magazines know what the students want?.So what will make the student happy in the law school? Lawctopus’s 2nd poll in the Law Student Happiness Index asked: What is the most important thing which determines your happiness in law school? .210 students answered and the results are as follows:.26%- Placements.25%- Involvement in things I like.21%- Peers and Friends.17%- Faculty.6%- Good infrastructure and the location of law school.4%-Others.2%- Parental and family support.Can the rankings published by Outlook be relied upon by parents and students to base their decision for selecting a law school?.“No” has been the answer since quite some time and now we have got the data to back it up..Consider this: The overall points which were allotted for law school rankings by Outlook in 2010 come out to be 800. The subdivision is as follows:.Selection Process and Age of Institution- 287.5Academic Excellence- 200Infrastructure and Facility- 212.5Personality Development and Industry Exposure- 143.8Placement- 156.3.While Placements were given a weightage of 19.5 percent (156.3 points), Infrastructure was given a weightage of 26.5 percent (212.5 points)..However, the Lawctopus poll shows that law students consider Infrastructure (6 percent) to be of very less importance vis-à-vis Placements (26 percent)..If we do some maths, we’ll find that Placements should be given 300 points while Infrastructure should be given 69 points..(This is based on how should the percentages and points allocated to Placement : Infrastructure should be distributed between themselves)..Presently, we can compare only these two indicators. However, other factors used by the magazine can be critically analysed by surveys of similar nature..Using our limited poll results and analysis, one thing is clear. There is a mismatch between what the law students want and what the magazines who rank law colleges think they want. Lawctopus survey has clearly proved how ill-informed, wrong and misleading such rankings are..So the next time you hear a parent or a CLAT aspirant discuss how some law school has dipped down in ranking this year, tell them politely that their trusted magazine is untrustworthy and that the magazine does not know (and does not care) about a young student’s needs and aspirations..Lawctopus’ Law Student Happiness Index (poll 1) is available here..Tanuj Kalia and Prateek Bhandari are both third year law students at NUJS, Kolkata and are founders of Lawctopus.