On its website, AUAP says "This unique LL.M ranking is based on Selectivity, Starting salaries 6 month after graduation and international image of the institutions defined by a panel of recruiters. This year 95% of the LLM Graduates were employed 6 months after graduation with an average salary of USD 85.000"

But this ranking seems quite strange : Cardoso Law School (??) is ranked sixth, Fordham is ranked seventh, Vanderbilt ninth, and Tulane tenth : these are not even in the top tier "official" rankings of US law schools !!

Yale only appears at the 12th position : how strange !! Then come San Diego, Wake Forest ...

Stanford is not on it, neither are University of Virginia, Michigan, Berkeley ...

This is total quackery ! Making money is their top priority but objectivity is not !

I am reposting something I wrote a few weeks ago on this topic:

I would like to warn anyone who relies on AUAPâs ranking of LL.M. programs. This ranking is not only unreliable, it is also fraudulent.

You will notice that AUAP provides absolutely no methodology or numbers or statistics to back up its ranking. AUAPâs objective is not to provide a real ranking, but to convince its clients (students who pay them $$$ for help with admissions) that they are getting them admitted into a âtop schoolâ, when they only succeed in sending them to very weak or average schools.

Many schools on that list are second or third tier schools: for example LSU, Cardozo, Penn State, Tulane, etcâ¦

Some of the above schools are not even among the top 50 best law schools in the US!

Moreover, several exceptional programs, such as Michigan, Virginia, and Stanford, which are clearly top 10 schools, are curiously missing from AUAPâs list.

For anyone who wants a real ranking of how a law school is viewed in the United-States, please see Brian Lighterâs faculty quality ranking or the US News ranking.

not to mention that their service is a complete joke:-(

Does anyone take it seriously?

Did anyone use their service?

I hope they do not use their service. It could only be a waste of money. It is FULL of errors of college and university names, to say nothing of grammatical errors and appalling writing. They should not advertise services correcting essays for admissions. The web pages seem as if written by a non-native speaker of English--just what you want to try to get into an American educational institution from abroad.

I also doubt that the ranking is that good. But, all rankings are not that objective (maybe the Leithner ranking is). Just check this article (among others):

http://www.llm-guide.com/article/6/university-ranking-and-its-discontents

Still: The unis that are in the top 10 of the AUAP are regarded to have very good and diverse LL.M. programs. Cardozo, Fordham and BU for instance have a excellent reputation when it comes to LL.M. programs. Therefore, I would not consider this ranking more ridiculous than other rankings.

And btw: Yale and Stanford are probably not on the list because their programs seem to be rather perfect for future academic career than for legal work in a law firm etc. (at least the program site states this).

I'll quote Churchill: "The only statistics you can trust are those you falsified yourself" - this is how I look at rankings! They might give kind of support but should not be taken as "the one and only" argument!