Of tails and dogs: Standards, standardisation and innovation in assessment

Abstract

The title of the conference from which some of the chapters in this book spring was ‘50 Years of Assessment in Legal Education’. The conference was an opportunity to look back, but also to look forward and think about how our legacy was formed in the last half century, and what of it we wanted to carry forward and shape differently in the future. In this chapter, we shall begin by giving a brief snapshot of legal education reform movements currently taking place in the Common Law world. We shall take one example of a recent consultation project in England and Wales, namely the Legal Education and Training Review (LETR), and analyse the project’s view on assessment.1 We shall consider then some of the hegemonic values and practices in assessment and why they can make change difficult to achieve. That it can take place, though, is evidenced by the assessment practices outlined in this book. It is also evidenced in other disciplines and other jurisdictions, and we shall consider some examples of that before ending with some examples of more radical assessment practices.