The Big News from the Conference on Assessment: Steve Bahls, Chair of the Student Learning Outcomes Subcommittee of the American Bar Association Section of Legal Education and Admission to the Bar’s Standards Review Committee, presented the draft of the new Standards on assessment. From his presentation, it sounds as if some form of these Standards will be recommended by the ABA.
Where do the new Standards take us? First, the ABA, fortunately in my view, is not taking an extreme position. The proposed Standards would require that all schools do some assessment of certain required competencies, such as “legal analysis and reasoning, legal research, problem solving, written and oral communication in a legal context.” Beyond that, each school is required to identify additional learning outcomes based upon its own mission. So, the ABA appears to be seeking to preserve a good degree of law school autonomy.
The real sea change comes, however, from the requirement that each school must “employ a variety of valid and reliable measures systematically and sequentially throughout the course of the students’ studies.” Thus, a school simply will not be able to use a single summative final examination in the future, at least not in all its courses. This is no doubt a good thing, but it will involve a huge change in how we teach.
Jeff Rensberger
[…] Subcommittee’s September 3, 2009 draft of the revised 300 Standards is available here. (HT Vice President Rensberger.) In July and August 2009 a task force of the AALL Academic Law Libraries Special Interest Section […]
Did Bahls say something in the presentation to lead you to the interpretation in your final paragraph about a requirement that multiple assessments be taken during individual courses?
I’m not seeing that in my reading of the proposed standards. The phrase “throughout the course of the students’ studies” seems to refer to the entire course of study through law school, not to individual courses. The examples of internal assessment measures given in the interpretation seem to be pretty typical law school stuff.
Maybe the word “variety” might produce the need for changes at some schools. It is hard to tell from the interpretations what that means. Most law schools already employ a “variety” if you compare final exams with measures used in skills classes and seminar classes (final papers, etc.).
Your quoted portion appears to have been adapted from standards used by colleges of pharmacy. Maybe the phrase has a specific meaning in that field that leads to a conclusion that law schools would have to drastically change their internal assessment methods.
The two aspects that stood out to me as potentially big changes were the possible use of the words “require” and “every” in 302(c) and the use of external assessment measures beyond bar passage (job placement, etc.).
[…] The ABA Student Learning Outcomes Subcommittee’s draft of the revised ABA “300″ Standards, from the ABA Standards for the Approval of Law Schools, is available, as presented by President Steve Bahls (see President Bahls’s presentation here) (HT Vice President Rensberger); […]