Assessment and accountability

Assessment for learning: a guide for law teachers

This is part of a guide, compiled by Alison Bone (University of Brighton) and Karen Hinett (UKCLE) in 2002, providing an overview of the chief issues involved in assessment and how it affects learning and teaching in law.

Accountability and the need to prepare students for society means pressure to transform curriculum, learning and teaching and assessment. Driving this need to reform assessment are political pressures on higher education to provide accountability. This has lead to a preoccupation with standards, evidence and accountability.

The current framework for academic review issued by the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) demands that subjects provide evidence of student progression, teaching, learning and assessment methods and learning resources in relation to the published benchmark standards for each discipline.

In law this means providing evidence that students have reached a general proficiency in seven areas:

Subject specific:

• knowledge
• application and problem solving
• sources and research

General transferable intellectual skills:

• analysis, synthesis, critical judgement and evaluation
• autonomy and ability to learn

Key skills:

• communication and literacy
• other key skills, including numeracy, IT and teamwork
  (Taken from the QAA’s Benchmark statement for law, 2000)

This provides a much clearer, yet arguably more restrictive, framework for what we teach and how we assess law at undergraduate level.

The QAA has also published a code of practice on assessment of students, to which all institutions are required to demonstrate adherence. Institutions will have differing views on the significance of the precepts contained in the code, but attention is drawn to those on:

• marking and grading (specifically precepts 7, 8 and 11)
• feedback to students on performance (precept 12)
• review of regulations (precept 16)

Professional courses are also under scrutiny by the accrediting professional bodies. To ensure standards worthy of the costs of the Bar Vocational Course (BVC) the Bar Council runs its own rigorous evaluation programme. Each provider is subject to an annual intensive three day visit, which includes scrutiny of learning, teaching and assessment documentation, the resources available to students, staff-student ratio and direct observation of teaching and discussion with students. Providers are offered face to face feedback on areas of improvement and are given a time limit to address problem areas.

For both higher education institutions and private providers compiling evidence of student competence means offering a paper trail of evidence detailing learning, teaching and assessment practices. This includes the clear articulation of course and learning objectives, explicit and transparent assessment criteria and evidence of the quality and frequency of feedback offered to students.

We must be careful not to let transparency of assessment systems take precedence over what they were designed to assess. It is one thing to ask “did the student learn what was intended?” and quite another to ask “what did the student learn?”. There is a danger that the perceived threat of external scrutiny means that academics become so preoccupied with justifying their practice (in the name of standards) that the people who it most affects are being forgotten.

References

Last Modified: 4 June 2010