Using Authentic Assessment Techniques in Extra & Co-Curricular Activities (ECCAs) to Improve Teaching Standards on Academic Law Programmes

Authentic assessments are aligned with workplace activities, as opposed to the more artificial, largely exclusively summative and austere, nature of traditional university assessment methods. In this paper, the authors assert that authentic assessments, although traditionally the preserve of extra and co-curricular (ECCA) course delivery, have the crucial benefit of improving teaching standards on academic law degree programmes, through ensuring that the key 'critical reasoning' skill which ensures academic assessment success, has been identified by the assessor and developed by the student throughout the assessment. In this paper, the essential elements of the critical reasoning skill is subdivided into its composite parts, into a simple checklist, for use in legal assessments. This checklist, when applied by the assessor, has two main purposes: (i) to ensure that the student has achieved the appropriate grade for the assessment; and (ii) to ensure consistency and maintenance of quality in the assessment method.