The Council of the ABA Section on Legal Education has directed its Standards Review Committee to “move toward incorporation of outcome measures in the accreditation standards”, and the Committee is now actively exploring a framework where law schools will be required to articulate appropriate student learning outcomes and periodically assess how well students are acquiring relevant skills and abilities. The Standards Review Committee requested an opportunity to present their thinking about this directional change in the ABA Standards to Annual Meeting attendees. The AALS Executive Committee chose to present this Forum so that you can both learn directly from the ABA Standards Review Committee about their deliberations and have an opportunity to express views and ask questions.
This program is designed to (1) demonstrate how other professional disciplines–such as medicine, pharmacy and dentistry–require their schools to articulate student learning goals and periodically measure student achievement of those goals, (2) provide examples of how learning outcomes and assessment practices are being implemented at some American law schools, (3) present and discuss a draft of a new accreditation standard that would require law schools to describe and assess student learning outcomes, and (4) provide an opportunity to consider the counter arguments to mandatory student learning goal assessment in the context of legal education.