It was a bad week for …
Being the example, after the University of Illinois College of Law was slapped with a $250,000 fine for inflating academic credentials of its incoming students in order to improve its ranking in U.S. News & World Report.
The fine is the first the American Bar Association has imposed for misreporting consumer data. Although Villanova University School of Law was censured in 2011 for inflating its academic credential numbers, no fine was levied on the school. Illinois, however, is a repeat offender; several years ago the school doctored its Westlaw and Lexis costs to report higher per-student expenditures, another input in the U.S. News rankings.
Villanova and Illinois each must post the ABA censure on their websites for two years and pay an outside firm to monitor their reporting for at least two years.
Living down past mistakes, after a 55 year-old CPA who was denied admission to Baylor Law School filed an age discrimination lawsuit against the school based in part on an email the school accidentally sent showing data of 442 Admitted Students.
Michael Kamps claims that his 169 LSAT was higher than 97% of Baylor’s admitted class and that the school failed to take into account the fact that his 3.2 GPA from Texas A&M in 1979 was earned before undergraduate GPAs were inflated. Kamps graduated in the top quarter of his undergraduate class, according to the suit.
It was a good week for …
Potato lawyers, after the University of Idaho raised $1.1 million in gifts and pledges for renovations to the Old Ada County Courthouse, future home of the Idaho Law Learning Center.
The learning center is a joint-venture between the school and the Idaho Supreme Court to create a legal education, state-government service and law-related civic education center in Boise. In addition to a public law library, the center will also house a third-year program for the University of Idaho College of Law. Another $500,000 in private funds were raised for educational programs at the center.
