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Case study: Designing appropriate assessments

York Law School
Scott Slorach

Scott Slorach describes how a third year undergraduate law module assessment is designed to allow students to 'flourish' by exploring their interests and personalising learning and assessment whilst demonstrating relevant practical skills as well as knowledge. In the two-part assessment, students are asked to:

  1. Collaborate to analyse and explore a problem incorporating individual research (30%).

  2. Propose two practical outputs based on this analysis and chosen to demonstrate the learning outcomes (70%). (e.g. journal article, case analysis, training materials for specialist and non-specialist audiences, op-ed newspaper piece, pitch for a radio programme, parliamentary committee submission)

This gives students freedom to explore their interests and preferences whilst also encouraging a sense of control and ownership over how the learning outcomes can be met and demonstrated. Scott describes the assessment, its rationale and its outcomes.

Watch their presentation:

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Transcript

Hello, everybody, I'm Scott. I'm the Director of Learning and Teaching at York Law School. Designing appropriate assessments as a cathartic experience for me, because during my degree at apparently one of the world's premier universities, I did 164 essays in the space of three years in terms of both learning and assessment, and I haven't written one since. So what I look to do is to provide a means of students demonstrating not just what they've picked up in terms of knowledge from their modules, but more importantly to be able to show relevant skills that we to develop over the course of a programme.

So the assessment that I'll take you through is in third year. The law school programme is heavily founded in problem based learning, and so what we want to do within the module is to look at how students can continue to develop problem based learning skills and advance their skills and then assess those. Deal with more complex scenarios in terms of facts, issues of law, and then importantly, for year three, there's always the idea of capstone modules or dissertations and so on, but conceptually, I think in year three, students should be able to having done two years of a degree, they should have room to flourish, they should be able to explore their interests, they should be able to take things in directions that they want to take in terms of their learning at the time and in terms of the future learning. And so to that extent, what we want to do is to look at the extent to which students in year three can also personalise the curriculum, personalise the assessment whilst continuing to demonstrate relevant module programme learning outcomes.

So what we do is a little bit like this. We provide a two part assessment and the first part is common to students in the sense of they are asked to do the same thing. So they work in what we call a student law firm of 10 to 12 students. In years one and two, they have a weekly PBL cycle, and here we're giving them a more complex problem to deal with, and over a period of four weeks, they work together to analyse the problem. They then independently carry out research based on the analysis, they apply problem-solving skills, they discuss it and they come back having done some research. They refine their findings and their analysis of the problem, and then they evaluate the position of the relevant parties brought up in that problem.

So what you see on screen is about half of the problem. Down the side there are prompts as to different legal issues, different areas of law we expect students to work towards. And the end point is that individually they need to put together a final report in a particular format of their analysis of that problem. So in that sense it's a common assessment, and to pick up the point in the chat, it's a summative assessment and it's 30% of their final mark in this module, so that gets them about 40-45% of the way through this particular 10 week module. The relevance of this stage, as well as the development of the PBL skills, is it introduces them into a multiplicity of issues and a multiplicity of areas of of law. Some of them will be previously learnt, some of them will be some of them will be new. And this is where it becomes more personal, so based on that scenario, students are allowed to propose two outputs. They have to be capable of demonstrating the relevant module learning outcomes, which are based around being able to research particular areas of law, explain issues within that area of law, being able to communicate to different audiences, to show perspectives on law and so on. They propose those two outputs to their teacher and their their peers in one of the workshops and explain how they will meet the relevant module learning outcomes, how they have the substance to fulfil sort of around 18 additional learning hours in terms of the research and the preparation of these outputs. There's an overall word limit, there's a requirement that the two outputs be in different formats which I'll come to shortly, and they should address different audiences. And these two outputs together will account for 70% of the final module mark.

So from about halfway through the module, the workshops then become surgeries, so students are expected to be working on developing these outputs. They come to the workshops, they can sit and they can work on these outputs. The tutor will go around and have one on ones with students. We have set peer review workshops as well where they present their work in progress to their colleagues and get feedback. And then finally, at the end of the module, they'll submit those two outputs. So we provide students with ideas and examples of what those outputs could be. I won't run through all of these, but you'll see there is a very broad range from very traditional articles, essays and so on through to very creative pieces which are very different in format, and even through in some cases, to setting up and preparing your own problem and then preparing an output based on your own problem. What we do, again we'll run through this in detail, is in the student handbook as well as giving them some ideas about potential outputs, we then explain what these things would actually consist of. So here's one for putting a pitch towards a Law in Action programme, the previous one is a submission to a parliamentary committee, and then what an op-ed piece which would be. And that's because we found that while giving students a sort of open field is a good thing, sometimes it panics students and they do want more guidance as to what things might appear in that open field.

So why is that less boring than setting an essay? Well, it gives students freedom to explore interests, it gives them a stake in both designing their own assessment, but it also directs their attention to the module, the programme learning outcomes, because they have to design their assessment in line with those. And whilst we all spend a lot of time and effort putting together a module and programme learning outcomes, I'm not always convinced the extent to which students actually engage with them. So this is a means of actually doing that.

So to run through from stage one to stage two and try and simultaneously pick up some of the points in chat which are coming through. In terms of the cohort size, it's the entire year, so around 150 to 200 students will take this module. It's compulsory but there's a choice and we have different themes, so we have one module which is around a corporate commercial scenario, one which is more around litigation, employment dispute and discrimination scenario, we have one which involves counterterrorism and media, we have one which is involved with criminal law and also the law as applies to children. So every student must take one of these modules particularly because of the PBL element. So it's compulsory but there's a choice. There's a collaborative element, which is part of our overall approach at law school, but there remains independent elements of research and writing. It's very applied and the output is something which is not an essay, it's a practical report. It's very efficient to mark because everybody is moving towards the same thing. On stage two, there's a student choice and therefore there's inclusivity in the sense that students can choose what they want to be assessed in and on and in terms of the format. And there's also the support with that provided by the surgeries and the workshops as we go through. In terms of standardised marking, we provide to tutors and students an explanation of how the module learning outcomes should be assessed, so we explain how these are demonstrated or how best they can be demonstrated, and that allows marking on the standardised basis in terms of how do the outputs meet the relevant criteria. So to that extent, we do have a unified rubric that applies to them all. We're in the third year of this. Students are coming up with very interesting outputs and we feel that it does it does provide a means of moving away from the traditional essay format to something that's more relevant both individually and in terms of the outputs.

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