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Professor Shawn Boyne presented the findings of the work she conducted with Yvonne Dutton and Professor Lahny Silva to evaluate students' legal reasoning competency. She talked about the findings, depicted in the photo at left, during the Scholars Teaching for Student Success at IUPUI's University Library on October 4.

IU McKinney faculty received a Curriculum Enhancement Grant in 2018 in order to design a systematic process to gather data on student performance of J.D. program objectives. During the self-study process, the law school faculty identified eight learning objectives for the IU McKinney J.D. program. The assessment, evaluation, and teaching committee is in the process of developing rubrics for each of those objectives.

In this project, Professors Boyne, Dutton, and Silva used the rubric designed to evaluate their students' legal reasoning competency to evaluate first-year exams in criminal law. They scored a random sample of the criminal law exams against the rubric. The 2019 scores indicated two areas where the faculty would like to see learning improvement in first-year students' legal reasoning abilities. They are in the process of developing two formative assessments that they will introduce in the Spring and Summer criminal law classes in 2020. They will then score those exams against the rubric to see if these curricular interventions improved students' legal reasoning skills.

This is a prototype of a larger assessment process that IU McKinney will undertake beginning in 2020. The new ABA standards mandate that law schools implement an assessment program in the J.D. program. In addition, the campus requires that all degree programs implement a regular process of assessment.