Roundtable: Assessing student learning: Using interdisciplinary synergies to develop good teaching and assessment practice

Sydney Masonic Centre

Tuesday September 4, 2007

Title: Synthesising Graduate Qualities within the LLB Curriculum: Assessment, outcomes and the “ethically informed” graduate.

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Author: John Littrich

Faculty of Law, University of Wollongong

This project involves the translation of the University of Wollongong’s (UOW) recently redrafted graduate qualities into specific graduate qualities for the Faculty of Law and facilitating the development of curricula across the LLB program that will project these qualities and support the nexus between outcomes and assessment in LLB subjects. Supporting this nexus poses particular challenges in the areas of skills and ethics.

The UOW graduate qualities refer to developing graduates who are “responsible” and the descriptors relating to this quality refer to students who “Understand how decisions can affect others and make ethically informed choices.” This presentation will focus on the challenges of teaching and assessing ethics. What type of assessment will best help produce graduates that will “make ethically informed choices”? How can attainment of such a quality be measured? Study in this area, including recent research carried out within the UOW Faculty of Law at UOW in relation to assessment of skills and capabilities suggest that integration of ethics into assessment tasks across the LLB curriculum together with clinical experience and opportunities for reflection on that experience can assist to answer these questions.

Keywords: graduate qualities, ethics, graduate attributes, assessment.