Catherine Martin Christopher (Texas Tech), Assessing Experiential Education in Law Schools: Toward a Modern Diploma Privilege, 93 Miss. L J. 1137 (2024):
Experiential education is an essential part of legal education because it moves law students from theoretical to practical understanding of the law and its implications. Legal education experts recommend significant experiential education in order to make law graduates practice-ready.1 Practical, experiential skills must be taught, and furthermore, students’ learning must be assessed, so all stakeholders—including employers and clients—can be assured that new attorneys are competent to practice.
Assessing the competence of students, and assessing the institution’s program of legal education, can be particularly daunting when considering experiential education; while knowledge can be assessed objectively, assessing skills is more subjective. Consistent, accurate assessment is particularly important because I believe law faculty are better situated to assess a broader range of competencies, over a more realistic timeframe, than the bar exam and its graders can.
This Article can be read as an expansion on my previous piece, Modern Diploma Privilege: A Path Rather Than a Gate, or as a standalone Article. Whether or not a state adopts a modern diploma privilege, there must be some manner by which stakeholders can be confident that law student competence is being assessed reliably, validly, and fairly and also that a law school’s program of legal education is teaching the knowledge, skills, and values that establish the competencies expected of first-year attorneys.
In my observation and experience, faculty work hard to grade fairly and consistently, but other than imposing or suggesting a curve to normalize grade distributions across classes or sections, little to no collaboration or comparison takes place to ensure that faculty grading practices are reliable, valid, and fair (as those terms are understood and defined more below.) Potential inconsistencies in assessment harm the public by producing law school graduates with inconsistent levels of competence. Inconsistencies are even more likely to exist in the assessment of skills (as opposed to knowledge), where criteria for competence and effectiveness are more difficult to articulate and therefore assess in a consistent, bias-free manner.
This Article thus addresses the assessment of experiential legal education, exploring both the principles undergirding assessment and the practical application of those principles to law schools. Part II reviews what constitutes experiential education in the law school context. Part III examines the assessment of individual students, in theory and in practice. Part IV addresses the assessment of a law school’s entire program of legal education, again in both theory and practice. Part V concludes by posing additional questions for future research.
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