A Four-Step Plan for Responding to the New ABA Standards
As most readers of this blog are aware, and as I have posted about previously, the ABA has enacted a series of new and revised standards on learning outcomes and assessment. These standards go into effect in August 2025, and site teams will expect to see progress toward compliance beginning in August 2026.
By way of review, the new ABA standards require, among other things:
- That a law school establish and publish programmatic learning outcomes (e.g., competencies students should have achieved upon graduating from law school)
- That a law school establish course-level learning outcomes (e.g., competencies students should have achieved upon completing a given course) for every class taught at the law school
The new standards culminate in the task of assessing the program of legal education on an ongoing basis.
This task can seem overwhelming. There is not a culture or tradition of assessment in legal education, and often there are not many — if any — people in the building with deep experience in this area. While a few law schools have taken the step of designating an associate dean of assessment, most have not.
In my role at LSAC, I help law schools with many of the tasks that might otherwise be undertaken by an associate dean of assessment or an Assessment Committee. Based on my experience working with law schools, I recommend the following four-step plan for responding to the new ABA standards:
- Revisit your programmatic learning outcomes (PLOs).
- Map your curriculum to determine if it actually supports student attainment of your PLOs.
- Revisit your course-level learning outcomes (CLOs).
- Based on the information you have gathered, develop a plan for assessing your PLOs on a rolling five-year basis.
For the first step, you will want to ask yourself: Do our current PLOs accurately reflect the values and goals of our law school? How do we decide what our PLOs should be? The list of minimum areas of competency in ABA Standard 302(a) provides a starting point, to be sure. But are there other skills that are important to your institution? You can look to things like the skills tested by the NextGen Bar Exam, the Foundations
project, or a survey of your own faculty, students, alumni, and/or employers.
Once you have decided what your PLOs should be, it’s time to determine whether your curriculum actually addresses them. For this, curriculum mapping is a useful tool. I’ve previously discussed how curriculum mapping can be a part of preparing students for NextGen, but it is also a useful tool in understanding where and whether courses are engaging with your PLOs and also the sufficiency of CLOs.
If you find that your CLOs do not align with your PLOs, are not sufficiently specific and measurable (as required by Standard 302(b)), or do not exist at all, then it is time to revisit them. Many faculty members have made their best effort at crafting CLOs that reflect what they hope that students will learn in their course, but again, because there is not a tradition of robust CLOs in legal education, a training session and/or workshop may be in order.
Finally, the ultimate goal of all of this work is to determine whether a majority of students have attained the competencies you have set forth in your PLOs. For this you need an assessment plan. A few guiding principles can help here:
- In reviewing and/or devising your PLOs, you must simultaneously consider what tools will be used to assess student attainment of those learning outcomes. There are plenty of valuable aspects of legal education that cannot be directly measured. But if something is going to be touted as a learning outcome, it must be measurable.
- Not every programmatic learning outcome needs to be assessed every year. In fact, this would be nearly impossible. Establish a schedule that allows you to rotate through all of your PLOs every five years.
- PLOs can be assessed by aggregating work product from one or more course(s) and re-scoring it with a criterion-based rubric; evaluating performance in a capstone course; or evaluating performance on a standardized test (e.g., a baby bar). These can be supplemented with indirect measures of competency like student, alumni, or employer questionnaires.
- Because PLOs are supposed to represent competencies possessed by students upon graduation, assessment of these would ideally occur closer to the conclusion of a student's time in law school. This is at odds, of course, with the tendency for law school curricula to be front-loaded in terms of both skills and subject matter. Recognition of this tension may prompt consideration of how scaffolding of instruction can be improved.
There is much more to unpack vis-à-vis learning outcomes and assessment. Please contact me at spollvogt@LSAC.org if you have questions about any of the above or would like to discuss these topics at greater length.
