Benchmarking first year assessment and standards across three institutions in the first year of a law program

Abstract

For academics working in regional universities the opportunity to collaborate with colleagues on developing assessment tasks, setting criteria and marking guidelines can be limited. This in turn leads to questions about how we ensure that the learning outcomes and standards we are expecting and imposing on our students are appropriate. In particular how do we ensure that our students who come from such diverse backgrounds are performing at the same level as other law students and that the quality of their learning is equal to that of other institutions? With renewed emphasis on transparent standards and quality assurance, through both TEQSA and the development of Threshold Learning Outcomes in Law, a team of academics from three regional universities decided to try to find the answers to these questions. Determining that carefully designed assessment provides an effective measure of the standard of learning outcomes, the team embarked on a project to compare, cross-mark, benchmark and moderate assessment across the first year of law at the three universities.