Traffic lights and responsibility to the profession

Jacqueline Cheltenham and Alison Mutch, College of Law

Presentation at Vocational Teachers Forum III, 10 January 2004

In their session at the third Vocational Teachers Forum the presenters discussed the new ‘red light’ assessment criteria introduced by the Bar Council for the Bar Vocational Course, considering the practical and conceptual difficulties of applying the red light approach in assessments.
The Bar Council’s assessment framework for 2003-04 is as follows:

“The skills assessments shall require students to demonstrate knowledge and comprehension of the law together with the ability to manipulate and utilise that knowledge in the analysis and preparation of the case employed for assessment. Inadequate demonstration of such knowledge and comprehension, or inadequate case analysis and preparation shall result in the candidate being failed in that assessment, irrespective of the marks achieved in other components of the assessment.”

The Bar Vocational Course providers present indicated that they were currently taking the following approaches:

• College of Law – the student would be marked in the normal way, however the marker would then consider separately a red light criterion. If the student failed that section of the skills criteria they would fail overall.
• Inns of Court School of Law – the way that the red light approach was being implemented varied according to the skill. They had found that they did not necessarily need to change the criteria, but organised the relevant ones so that all the red light points were under the same part of the criteria. If the student failed that criterion they would fail.
• University of the West of England – where students received less than 50% of the marks for the criteria that assessed their use of the law the students would fail. It was indicated that this had led to students being scared to commit themselves in relation to the law, that they ‘hedged their bets’ more.

Concerns and ideas that were explored in the discussion included:

Equality of assessment:

• How do we ensure there is consistency of approach between providers?
• How many legal issues should there be in an assessment?
• How do we weight the marks to different ‘red light’ errors within the same assessment?
• How do we decide is something is a mistake or merely arguable?
  Other issues raised included:

• it had been observed that student nervousness had increased
• there were other areas as suitable, or more suitable, for the red light approach, such as communication skills
• a student might have a bad day
• in practice there would be opportunities to correct mistakes after the event in many scenarios, unlike assessments

It was also considered whether the red light approach could be marked across skills in a similar way to professional ethics, so they need to pass this aspect over the course as a whole and not just one assessment.

Last Modified: 4 June 2010