U.S. News World Report, which releases annual rankings of graduate schools, announced on Wednesday that the 1997 edition contains erroneous law school rankings.

The incorrect rankings appear in the 1997 America's Best Graduate Schools guidebook, which was released Monday, as well as the March 10 issue of the magazine. Rankings of other graduate schools in the guidebook were not affected by the error.

The inaccuracy occurred when two of the fields in the law-school database--graduates' nine-month employment rate and graduates' nine-month unemployment rate--were inadvertently switched, affecting the overall score of every law school in the database, according to Robert Morse, director of research for the America's Best Graduate Schools guide.

The mistake was discovered when the dean of a ranked law school raised questions concerning the data, Morse said.

The rankings of 33 of the top 50 law schools were changed as a result of the errors, according to Morse.

However, the corrections "did not change the position of either Harvard or Yale," which are ranked second and first, respectively.

U.S. News Editor James M. Fallows '70 said in a Wednesday news release that U.S. News was "distressed to learn of this mistake, and we're taking direct and immediate steps to correct it."

The magazine has recalled the 1997 America's Best Graduate Schools guide and plans to include a revised copy of the law-school rankings in next week's issue of its weekly magazine.

U.S. News will also release a corrected version of the graduate schools guide in about two to three weeks, Morse said.

The U.S. News Web site, www.usnews.com, has also been changed to reflect the corrected rankings.

The corections on the Web should help to spread the news of the revised results, according to Morse.

"A lot of people look at [the Web site], because it's free," Morse said. "Many people won't even know about [the error]."

According to Andy Rosen, executive vice president of Kaplan Educational Systems--which produces a rival guidebook that does not include rankings--the miscalculation raises further questions concerning the validity of the ranking system in general.

"Yesterday the University of Chicago was a better school than Stanford, and today Stanford is better than the University of Chicago," he said.

"Rankings can obscure the real value of a school. You wouldn't choose a person to date based on a photograph. But students choose a college based on rankings," Rosen added.

At the same time, Rosen commended U.S. News & World Report on its handling of the mistake.

"It's courageous of them to handle [the mistake] this way...they haven't tried at all to run away from this.