Most law professors plan their assessments a week or two before their exams are administered (depending on the due date given by the law school administration). This post articulates a counter-intuitive point: it is a best practice to plan your assessments as the second step in designing your courses, right after articulating your learning outcomes. While this recommendation may sound to you like I am advocating for “teaching to the test,” I am not. 

Instead, I am advocating for a core principle of course design, one that is, in fact, embodied in the new ABA standards that require course-level outcomes and assessment of those outcomes. That principle is congruence: our assessments should be congruent with our learning outcomes; in other words, we should assess whether our students have achieved our learning outcomes. Likewise, how and what we teach and our teaching materials (including casebook selections) should be congruent with our assessments and our learning outcomes; in other words, we should make sure our teaching prepares students to achieve our learning outcomes on our assessments. What does it mean to plan assessments?

• Start with your learning outcomes. 
• You do not need to write the actual test questions at this stage. What you need to do is plan how you will assess each outcome. (See the table below for an example.)
• Every outcome must be assessed every time you teach the course. That principle does not require you to assess every outcome on every assessment; it requires you to include at least one assessment of every outcome at some point in the course. For example, if your outcomes include knowing certain specified doctrinal areas and being able to spot issues in those areas, analyze complex facts, and predict legal outcomes, your assessments should include at least one question that assesses whether your students have achieved these learning outcomes for the specified doctrinal areas.

• The ABA Standards also require a mix of formative and summative assessments. That practice also happens to produce greater learning.
• Your plan ideally would include a mix of types of assessments, including essay questions, multiple-choice questions, and NextGen Bar-style short answer questions. 
• You also should try to assess your most important outcomes in more than one way (e.g., short answer and essay) and on more than one occasion.
• Thus, for example, in my contracts class, I assess doctrinal knowledge of contract formation with formative, in-class mini-hypotheticals, in-class multiple-choice questions (I have students hold up cards that have A, B, C, or D on them.), a group practice midterm, a midterm essay, and five final exam multiple-choice questions. A portion of my assessment plan, as a document, therefore, looks like the chart below. When I am ready to create the actual midterm and final, I use the specifications to create exam questions that assess student learning according to the priorities reflected in the chart.

I am departing soon for a family vacation. Look for my next teaching tidbit on July 16.