Standard 314 of the American Bar Association’s accreditation standards provides: “A law school shall utilize both formative and summative assessment methods in its curriculum to measure and improve student learning and provide meaningful feedback to students.”
Its interpretive comments elaborate: “Formative assessment methods are measurements at different points during a particular course or at different points over the span of a student’s education that provide meaningful feedback to improve student learning. Summative assessment methods are measurements at the culmination of a particular course or at the culmination of any part of a student’s legal education that measure the degree of student learning.”
Law faculty members therefore need to become adept in using assessment tools both to provide students with feedback that allows the students to understand and improve their own level of proficiency, and to provide a final measure of the quality of the student’s work. The typical law school assessment tool is the final examination, an example of a summative assessment method, but many others are available.
This page provides links to information about some tools that faculty might want to incorporate in their classes. Each class might use only a few tools; the trick is to choose the ones that best align with what the students should learn.
Formative Assessment Ideas
Law School Exams
Using Rubrics
- Class Participation Rubric
- Client Letter Rubric
- Complaint Rubric
- Negotiation Exercise Rubric
- Research Paper Rubric
- Rubric Template
- Sparrow Describing the Ball
- Student Reflection Rubric