Today’s release of U.S. News & World Report’s annual graduate-school rankings may prompt some people to wonder: Hey, what happened to the National Research Council’s major assessments of doctoral programs? Weren’t those supposed to have been released earlier this year?

The answer is that the research council’s report has been delayed — not for the first time — by its peer-review system.

Beyond that, officials at the council say that they do not want to make public promises about the report’s timetable. They urge interested parties to monitor the project’s Web site for announcements.

As for U.S. News, the magazine has added a new set of rankings for part-time law-school programs, in part as a response to concerns that some law schools might use their part-time programs to game the ranking system.

But the magazine’s new system is unlikely to satisfy all of its critics. In the debut issue of the Drexel Law Review, Louis H. Pollak, a former law dean at Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania, broadly attacks the magazine’s law-school rankings and offers an alternative ranking system of his own. —David Glenn