Assessment Collaborators Available

To help law professors interested in developing, implementing and publishing empirical work on student learning and assessment issues, SALT has developed a list of potential social science collaborators who want to help create this body of research and SALT has developed a listserv to support faculty involved in this kind of empirical research.  To participate in that listserv, click here. 

Law school assessments have significant consequences in terms of the profession’s diversity, students’ job opportunities, and their mental health.  Despite these high-stakes, little work has been done to empirically test the validity and reliability of existing law school assessments or to develop valid and reliable assessments that test the broad range of skills competent lawyers need. 

Law schools lag behind medicine, architecture, and engineering, in failing to identify and then assess the acquisition of the professional skills and values needed to become a novice attorney.  SALT has been working for years to enlarge the vocabulary of assessment beyond the LSAT, beyond multiple choice and essays, and certainly beyond the bar exams.  Now that the ABA Council on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar is reviewing all of the Standards and Interpretations for Approval of Law Schools, the time is ripe to explore true outcome measures and the ways to assess the efficacy of teaching and testing. 

To further this goal of moving legal education towards a more effective and equitable assessment regime, in July 2009, the SALT Issues in Legal Education Committee submitted a proposed interim standard to the ABA Council that will encourage experimentation and give schools the experience necessary to develop more specific outcome measures that can serve as models for additional accreditation standards in the future.  To read SALT’s submission, click here. 

Again on October 2, 2009, SALT submitted a response to the proposal of the Student Learning Outcomes Subcommittee of the Standards Review Committee, which was considered by the SRC at its October 9, 2009 meeting.

“SALT has long supported a shift in accreditation standards that would result in law schools consciously focusing on their students’ acquisition of the knowledge, skills and values needed for the practice of law. We have carefully reviewed the Subcommittee’s detailed proposal and commend the Subcommittee for its thoughtful and measured approach. We support the four guiding principles that animated the Subcommittee’s work and believe that its proposal reflects those important principles. SALT particularly applauds the extent to which the proposal incorporates essential values, including 302(a)(3)’s reference to a lawyer’s ethical responsibility as a public citizen responsible for the quality and availability of justice and 305’s reference to law as a public profession calling for performance of pro bono legal services and public service activities.”

“We comment here on four issues, three of them identified by the Subcommittee as particularly problematic: the extent to which the new Standards should mandate a comprehensive list of skills; whether the Standards should require a clinical learning experience; and the role that bar passage should continue to play in accreditation. We also suggest revising the Standard that articulates how to determine if a school has complied with the new Standards. We hope that the SRC will find the following
comments and suggestions helpful.”

Click here to read the entire October 2, 2009 statement. 

Thank you to Washburn University for hosting a listserv designed to support law faculty and social science researchers interested in developing empirical research and scholarship related to law student learning and law school assessment issues.