Steel, Alex; Fitzsimmon, Dominic --- "Answering Legal Problem Questions in a Grid Format" [2013] UNSWLRS 44

Last Updated: 27 July 2013

Answering Legal Problem Questions in a Grid Format

Alex Steel, University of New South Wales

Dominic Fitzsimmons, University of New South Wales



This paper is available for download at Available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2289089

Citation

This paper is to be published in Marking Time: Leading and Managing the Development of Assessment in Higher Education, 2013 . This paper may also b/e referenced as [2013] UNSWLRS 44.

Abstract

The development of legal reasoning skills is a fundamental aspect of legal education. What has sometimes been called “learning to think like a lawyer” is a threshold competency that students must acquire before they can progress to more complex analyses of broader legal issues. This chapter discusses the use of problem-based scenarios to both engage students and to develop legal analysis. It outlines the threshold difficulties students must overcome in order to read texts as lawyers and explains how use of a grid format answer – rather than an essay format – can both assist students to overcome these difficulties more easily and also provide a more efficient form of marking. The chapter describes the advantages of a grid format answer both for beginning students and also for later year and postgraduate students. It also suggests ways the format can be used to require students to consider broader issues than merely legal analysis.