Abstract
The American Bar Association (ABA) accreditation standards involving outcome-based assessment are a game changer for legal education. The standards reaffirm the importance of providing students with formative feedback throughout their course of study to assess and improve student learning. The standards also require law schools to evaluate their effectiveness, and to do so from the perspective of student performance within the institution’s program of study. The relevant question is no longer what are law schools teaching their students, but instead, what are students learning from law schools in terms of the knowledge, skills, and values that are essential for those entering the legal profession. In other words, law schools must shift their assessment focus from one centered around inputs to one based on student outputs.
Compliance with the ABA’s assessment mandate comes at a time when law school resources are spread thinner than ever. Indeed, faculty already work with plates that are full with students, scholarship, and service. Thus, while not all in the legal academy are on board with the ABA’s approach to outcomes assessment or to outcomes assessment generally, as busy educators, we should all at least agree that the requisite response should be efficient, given that resources are limited, and meaningful, such that the work done can benefit our learners. To do so, law schools should begin at their own tables set with full plates, so to speak, taking stock of what institutions and their faculty are already doing in terms of assessment. And it is important to think broadly here, as faculty may be surprised to learn how many of their colleagues are already doing relevant work.
While law schools may already be inclined to begin from within, this Article outlines concrete strategies they can use when working with existing faculty expertise and resources to respond to the ABA’s assessment mandate in a meaningful way for students, and with the goal of maximizing efficiency and gaining broad buy in. While prior scholarship has outlined best practices for outcomes assessment and even shared examples of how to engage in the process in the law school setting, this Article is unique in its depth and breadth of coverage by setting out a detailed case study that illustrates the process of developing an authentic assessment tool and beginning the process for adapting that tool to respond to both the individual student assessment and law school assessment required by the ABA.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
3-2020
4-14-2020
Repository Citation
Henke, Melissa N., "When Your Plate is Already Full: Efficient and Meaningful Outcomes Assessment for Busy Law Schools" (2020). Law Faculty Scholarly Articles. 641.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/law_facpub/641
Notes/Citation Information
Melissa N. Henke, When Your Plate is Already Full: Efficient and Meaningful Outcomes Assessment for Busy Law Schools, 71 Mercer L. Rev. 529 (Winter 2020).