Assess Early, Assess Often: Formative Assessment in Legal Education

I recently returned from San Francisco, where I presented at ExamSoft’s Assessment on Tour plus Law mini-conference. These conferences are hosted by and specifically intended for those in the student assessment field.

I specifically spoke on “Using ExamSoft to Help with Formative Assessment in Legal Education.”

Formative assessments are relatively new to legal education.

The ABA has only required law schools to formatively assess their students for a couple of years now. Since the beginning of the 2016-2017 academic year, the ABA has required ABA-approved law schools to use both summative and formative assessment methods to measure and improve student learning and provide meaningful feedback to students (ABA Standard 314).

However, while law schools are required to follow Standard 314, the ABA has given little guidance on what law schools need to specifically do to comply with the new Standard.

Here’s what the ABA had to say about this in a June 2015 Managing Director’s Guidance Memo: “Schools must be engaged in meaningful assessment of their progress in helping students achieve outcome goals. The Standards create considerable space for schools to develop their own assessment schemes that fit their program and their culture. However, each school must use both formative and summative assessments.”

The Memo goes on to say that law schools that cannot show that they are “seriously engaged” in the work that is necessary to develop and adopt an assessment program can expect that the ABA’s Accreditation Committee will ask for a report back that demonstrates that appropriate progress is being made.

That’s like a law school being asked to go to the principal’s office. Or worse.

As I mentioned in my presentation in San Francisco, legal education tends to lag behind other disciplines, especially other programs like nursing and pharmacy. The recent adoption of specific standards by the ABA on learning outcomes and assessments was a move that had been completed by other accrediting bodies for other disciplines decades ago. Better late than never.

As someone who works in the areas of academic success and bar preparation, I am a huge proponent of formative assessments—even before formative assessments became mandated by the ABA.

What is formative assessments as opposed to summative assessments? Well, summative assessments are what most people think of when they think of law schools. Summative assessments are the three- to four-hour final exams given at the end of a course to measure what a student has learned over the course of the semester—and, usually, the student’s course grade is wholly made up of this single exam. They are the ultimate high-stakes exam (the bar exam excluded, of course).

Formative assessments, on the other hand, are regular assessments throughout the semester that enable faculty to provide students with meaningful feedback on their progress and ways they can improve.

Now, who’s “they”? Students? Faculty?

Formative assessments are important to helping students learn and helping teachers teach better. Formative assessments are a win-win for both groups, as long as feedback is timely and meaningful so that the students can make the necessary adjustments to improve their learning in time before that high-stakes summative assessment at the end of the course.

For students, formative assessments—whether they be quizzes, in-class clicker or polling questions, reflection exercises, pre- or post-class assignments, etc.—can help students develop self-awareness and learning management skills. They can help students reduce feelings of isolation in larger classes. They can help students increase understanding and their ability to think critically about legal doctrine. And they can also assist students with reducing their procrastination and other bad habits since they need to be prepared for assessments throughout the semester instead of the traditional lone final exam model of assessing law students.

For faculty, formative assessments can provide professors with regular feedback that can be applied immediately. They can help professors address student misconceptions or lack of understanding in a timely way. And they can provide useful information to professors about what their students have learned without the amount of time required for producing higher-stakes examinations like midterms and final exams and reading papers.

One of the best lines I heard from another speaker was this: “Formative assessment without feedback is just summative assessment by different name.” That could not be truer!