Journal article
What Do Law Students Want?: The Missing Piece of the Assessment Puzzle
Rutgers law journal, Vol.42, p1
2010
Abstract
Some of the most pointed critiques of legal education focus on law student assessment. Critics argue that law schools can be doing a much betterjob of both helping students learn and gauging how well students have learned. This scrutiny is likely going to increase, as a process is currently underway to consider the incorporation of explicit provisions regarding assessment into the American Bar Association 's Standards for the Approval of Law Schools.
Despite the importance of assessment in legal education, there is remarkably little empirical research that focuses on the perspectives of the constituency that is most immediately affected by assessment in legal education: law students.
This Article contributes new information to our understanding of lawstudents' perspectives regarding assessment. Specifically, it presents data from an empirical research project that has investigated, inter alia, law students' assessment preferences at the beginning and the end of the first year of law school. This project provides new insight into law students' assessment preferences and perspectives. This project also highlights the need for ongoing research with law students regarding their preferences and perspectives about assessment and other aspects of legal education.
The research suggests that, although a majority of responding law students indicate that they want multiple graded assignments, law students' preferences for multiple graded and ungraded assignments may actually decline from the beginning to the end of the first year of law school. These findings are particularly significant in light of recent proposals to reform law school assessment by adding more grading and ongoing feedback. In addition, the data suggest that the individual assessment preferences of law students may not exist in isolation but, rather, may be related to both other assessment preferences and other preferences and perspectives regarding legal education
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Details
- Title
- What Do Law Students Want?: The Missing Piece of the Assessment Puzzle
- Creators
- Emily B Zimmerman - Drexel University, Thomas R. Kline School of Law
- Publication Details
- Rutgers law journal, Vol.42, p1
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Academic Unit
- Thomas R. Kline School of Law
- Identifiers
- 991021899510904721