Giving Students the Third Degree: Using Authentic Assessment Techniques in Extra & Co-Curricular Activities (ECCAs) to Improve Teaching Standards on Academic Law Programmes

Authentic assessments are closely aligned with activities that take place in real work settings, as
distinct from the often artificial constructs of university courses. The undergraduate law degree
differs from many other degrees, in that it requires arguments to be constructed, at even the most
academic level.
While the traditional ‘paper-based’ assessment strategy provides a pragmatic solution to the problem
of a general lack of time and resources to grade students en masse, the authors believe that the use
of authentic assessment techniques, in accredited and university-run extra and co-curricular
activities (ECCAs), are perfectly placed to augment legal education.
As long as the ECCAs are delivered with academic law degree learning outcomes taken under
consideration, and are rigorously delivered by staff who are trained and experienced to elicit
optimum student performance, students will benefit from authentic assessment in other indirectly
connected areas of their academic lives.
By delivering authentic assessments methods in ECCAs, a combination of formative and summative
techniques used throughout the assessment processes improves student performance, which
thereby has positive cross-impact onto law degree academic performance.
This two-way communicative assessment strategy allows students to benefit from continuous
mid-assessment feedback, which serves to best demonstrate the adversarial nature of the legal
system and the demands placed on lawyers to provide clear, simple, usable legal advice – a skill
best learned in the ECCA authentic assessment environment, rather than in the artificial ‘one-shot’
approach to traditional coursework and paper-based exam assessments, which provides primarily a
summative assessment and/or a weak/unusable formative element in future assessments. Further
benefits, such as increased confidence in critical reasoning skills, also improves the students’
academic performance.
Since authentic assessment is a two-way process, the authors assert that the deployed techniques
improve teaching performance on the law degree programmes by encouraging the identification of
crucial critical analysis points in legal topics, and rewarding the construction of legal arguments. The
authors have constructed a set of interactive questions which demonstrates that traditional paper-based assessment strategies are not the optimum way to monitor and improve teaching
practices, and that authentic assessment, when used in conjunction with ECCAs, improves student
performance on the academic law degree programme.

© 2015 International Institute of Social and Economic Sciences