Submitted by Colin Marks
This discussion group explored, in-depth, assessment in the law classroom and in particular formative assessment. It was quickly agreed that formative assessment is not only valuable to the students’ ultimate ability master the materials but is also likely to become a required part of law school curricular requirements with the coming years. But assessment comes with a number of challenges, not the least of which is the time it takes to craft good formative assessment but also grade them, and grade them consistently. Technology can help facilitate administering formative assessments, but large class sizes present issues for formative assessment for anything beyond multiple choice questions. It was agreed that current and upcoming students are likely to expect more formative assessments and faculties would be well-advised to engage in discussions about how to incorporate formative assessments requirements into the classroom in both online and residential courses.