Best Practices for Legal Education

Karen Sloan at the National Law Journal reports that the ABA Standards Review Committee made some decisions during its recent meeting.  In addition to eliminating the faculty-student ratio, here are some other highlights from her article:

• The committee voted to require law students to complete at least six credit hours of experiential coursework—clinics, externships or simulation courses. That would be up from the existing one credit-hour requirement, but less than the 15 hours suggested by the Clinical Legal Education Association or the 15 hours being pursued by the State Bar of California.

• It adopted a new student-learning outcomes requirement. Law schools would have to establish a list of competencies that students must achieve and assess whether they are meeting those goals. This measure is intended to make schools look beyond bar-pass rates to determine whether they are meeting student needs. However, the recommended standard leaves law schools plenty of leeway in determining what the learning outcomes should be and how to assess them.

• The committee voted to increase the number of credits law students may receive from distance learning classes from 12 to 15 and eliminated the rule that students may take no more than four distance-learning credits per semester. Students could take a full semester of courses away from their home campus.

Read more: here.

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