So, the Big Question is how does one perform a meaningful assessment in a large doctrinal class of, say, 90 students?\u00a0 One of the most cogent remarks of the Conference was David Thompson’s observation that for assessment to penetrate deeply into law school classrooms, it must be made “dumb easy.”\u00a0 Methods that work in small group settings do not easily transform to a larger group unless a huge investment is to be made in additional teaching resources.<\/p>\n
Long before the ABA’s interest in assessment, I wondered, like many doctrinal professors, what exactly is the reason I get away with giving only a single final exam for a course, with no quizzes and no mid-terms.\u00a0 The answer I came up with, which I think is sound, is this:\u00a0 Law schools and students strike a deal.\u00a0 Students forego the more regularized feedback and\u00a0 assessment present in most educational settings in exchange for getting a full professor and no teaching assistants.\u00a0 One obvious way to make assessment work in a large doctrinal class is to farm it out to TAs.\u00a0 But that breaks the bargain traditionally struck.\u00a0 So, other than through TAs, how do we do assess in large classes?\u00a0 If this is to occur, it is going to either change the historic bargain or involve the magic genies of technology.\u00a0\u00a0 And there are some cost and time-effective means of assessing through technology such as on-line quizzes and audience response software.\u00a0 But nothing is free.\u00a0 If there is a cheap way to assess, it is probably less effective as a means of assessment than a costly and time-consuming one.<\/p>\n
Jeff Rensberger<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So, the Big Question is how does one perform a meaningful assessment in a large doctrinal class of, say, 90 students?\u00a0 One of the most cogent remarks of the Conference was David Thompson’s observation that for assessment to penetrate deeply into law school classrooms, it must be made “dumb easy.”\u00a0 Methods that work in small […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,36,26,12,21,15,3,11,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aba","category-assessment","category-commentary","category-conferences","category-law-professors","category-law-schools","category-rankings","category-student-learning","category-teaching"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":212,"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions\/212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}