As our knowledge of COVID19 and its impact becomes more extensive each day, each workplace, profession and community is facing some common and some unique questions. Those working on the front lines in hospitals – such as several of my relatives in NYC and NJ – are experiencing the kind of trauma, shortages, emotional overload and duress that is usually experienced in wartime. It can only be weakly imagined by the rest of us. For those of us not experiencing people suffering and dying in front of us on a daily basis, some less horrific choices are before us: How do we modify “business as usual”? How do we evolve and adapt with each days new tsunmai of information and data? How do we support our best selves and our core values in this historically momentous time on our shared planet?
Before turning to the topic of grading and assessment, I want to pause to give a shout-out to my home institution. Our multi-talented leader Dean Alicia Ouellette has been holding community town halls every day since Friday March 20th. (BTW Dean Ouellette just shared on Facebook that she had been suffering from “presumptive COVID 19” fever and symptoms but thankfully is now symptom free). During our daily town halls, my faculty colleagues and I have expressed our wonder and gratitude for the character, resilience and grit of our law students who are balancing so much right now, and facing so many financial, tech-related, health and extended family burdens. Our students’ engaged and forgiving response to “tech-curious but not necessarily tech-savvy” teachers and their community-minded empathy for those hardest hit keeps the faculty motivated and inspired.
One of the COVID19 decisions for legal educators involves whether and how we assess and sort — which in reductive vernacular means “grade and rank.” Maintaining appropriate expectations, options, rigor and excellence in law teaching may assume primacy for those who have been long focused on ensuring that law students receive real value for the time, talent and treasure they expend on law school. For others focused on fairness in law placement, transparent employer signals about how they will view Spring 2020 legal education may be most influential. For those concerned about our profession’s reputation for lack of wellness and lack of diversity, those concerns are elevated at this moment when those least advantaged are most hard pressed. For those struggling with equity, there are so many permutations and consequences of COVID19 – whichever choice a school makes – that voting faculty could become as immobilized as Chidi Anagonye on THE GOOD PLACE. (BTW Good idea for escape television for those who love philosophy or Kristen Bell).
On the other hand, might this be a moment to look for the opportunities for reform and improvement that only come when the status quo is disturbed and rocked to its foundations as is happening now. Here is what I am thinking:
Might Mandatory P/F force educators and employers to admit that traditional law school grading and ranking is a misleading and reductive proxy for measuring potential success as a lawyer?
Could it force employers to use other ways to learn about the WHOLE STUDENT with all her strengths, gaps, and individual aptitudes including the situation she faced during law school?
Might it accelerate a move to a more qualitative than quantitative assessment of each law student? Or, at least might it prioritize learning which enables a school to assemble a portfolio of student recommendations ( demonstration of knowledge, skills, aptitudes, and professionalism)?
Foundational resources include of course Educating Lawyers, Best Practices in Legal Education, and Building on Best Practices: Transforming Legal Education in a Changing World, which also provide helpful wisdom points. In addition, looking back through the dozen or so years of this blog’s existence, there are lessons from which we can pull core knowledge and core values to assist in our continued educational deliberations at this turbulent time.
CORE KNOWLEDGE AND REFLECTIONS
Valuing Legal Education over Sorting – For example, focus on the difference between assessment and grading. Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers conferences have brought employers, law schools, and legal education stakeholders together to tackle the disconnect between our current sorting systems (primarily used to help elite employers looking for a simple and reductive initial screening system) and the needs of society and most employers for competent new attorneys and the needs of students and the profession for fairness.
Focus instead on formative and evaluative assessment of law students and graduates
Focus on growth mindset, on reflection and learning from mistakes or experience
Recognize the limits and problems with GPA’s or LSAT scores to create a more competent profession with more able and diverse learners.
Acknowledge that the media and the academy is still stuck in a mindset that focuses on sorting methods rather than on better preparation and assessment of law students to serve clients and society.
Class rank does not predict who will become a competent, healthy and ethical lawyer
Effective Education includes
CORE LEARNING VALUES
Student-centered Learning and the Introduction to the original Best Practices – “One of our basic tenets is that law schools should become more student-centered”
There is a common theme here: P/F with alternative assessment information and measures should be seen not as temporary emergency expedients to “sort and rank”, but rather as long overdue components of a better educational program and more nuanced assessment paradigm.
I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. I wish all our readers and citizens of our little blue planet moments of peace, love, safety, and compassion. May someone be kind to you today and let’s pay it forward.
Filed under: academic freedom, Bar Exam, Best Practices, Best Practices & Curriculum, Best Practices & Setting Goals, Best Practices and Clinics, Best Practices for Institutional Effectiveness, Best Practices, Diversity & Social Justice, Best Practices, Outcomes & Assessment Techniques, Catalysts For Change, Disruptive Leadership, Diversity & Social Justice, First Year Law School Innovations, Uncategorized | Tagged: best practices, COVID19, diversity, education, feedback, law, law school, lawyers, learning, legal education, LSAT, New York, research, Social Justice, teaching, training |
Best Practices for Legal Education 
Great piece, dear Mary–thanks!
Mary–I have been meaning to reply. I agree that traditional law school evaluation by rank and grades seems to at times miss the whole student. I truly hope that the learnings out of this crisis will point the way toward reform and finding ways to look at competence to practice law in a more holistic way. Law school curricula are not, it seems to me, as adaptable to differences in learning styles, which can make it hard for students with these differences who can be competent lawyers!