Law Tutors present findings from their innovative skills assessments
22nd July 2022
Driven by changes in the legal landscape, the law team re-developed their assessment strategy, with effect from this academic year, in order to embed industry skills into summative assessment at all levels of the degree. Coming to the end of the first academic year since these changes, tutors who have adopted novel, skills-based assessments had the opportunity to reflect on the perceived effectiveness of such assessment types at the University of Gloucestershire’s annual Festival of Learning (FoL). The FoL sees colleagues from across the University share good practice and approaches to teaching and learning, to enhance individual courses and overall student experience.
The presentation, contributed to by Lottie Park-Morton, Catherine Crampton, Kushal Adheen and Jonathan Cooper, reflected on various skills-based assessments that had taken place this year: oral submissions to the Court of Protection in Medical Law, negotiation and drafting of contractual clauses in Commercial Law, letter writing to a client in Land Law and verbal arguments to a tribunal in Regional and International Trade Law.
The main findings of the presentation were that students valued the opportunity to develop these practical legal skills and that, on the whole, student performance in these types of assessments was enhanced. This reflects an initial hypothesis in the re-design of the course that students can often perform better in more original assessment types.
We look forward to developing these assessments further, in order to support students in developing their practical legal skills and to identity as the lawyers they are!