Payne, R --- "Peer-learning at the University, Trusting the Students" [2004] LegEdDig 3; (2004) 12(3) Legal Education Digest 4

Peer-learning at the University, Trusting the Students

R Payne

[2004] LegEdDig 3; (2004) 12(3) Legal Education Digest 4

37 Law Teacher 2, 2003, pp 143–156

This paper reports a discovery that separate sets of students, using criteria based methods of peer marking, have produced consistent results. It happened in the second cycle of a university postgraduate optional course, in which most of the administration and all the formative assessments were carried out by the students. The course was Advanced Civil Litigation (ACL), which was run at Nottingham Law School skills-based Bar Vocational Course (BVC), United Kingdom.

This new course was devised to be practical and ‘problem-based’. Two concurrent cases were used, with cross-over service of documents between the students. This framework supported a series of assessed performances in the practice of litigation, making use of the skills and knowledge already acquired in the core subjects. Students were divided into two sections, each of which was subdivided into two groups, each with three firms, with one tutor allocated to each section. The effect was to create two parallel courses with no classroom contact between them. It was this arrangement which allowed the consistency of peer marking to be checked.

The instructions included that the members of the firms should collaborate on legal research and on selection and coaching of their advocates. Some drafting of documents was planned to be done individually and some in firms. In the advocacy exercises, there were competitions within groups between firms and then between the group champions.

Written criteria for marking were provided by the tutor and each class began with a discussion led by the tutor about the meaning and application of the criteria to the work-piece. Each written paper was circulated in class to be marked by a succession of students, not by the tutor, and it was the average of those marks which was recorded on the student’s score-sheet. Advocacy performances were marked on the spot by the whole class. At the end of the marking session, each student was requested to give feedback to the class on points of learning arising from the scripts or performances he/she had just marked and for moderation of any marks affected by comments made during that part of the session.

Since the success of the course was likely to depend on the goodwill of the students, efforts were made to develop a culture of student activity and motivation. The course ended with a summative assessment marked by the tutor in order to comply with the requirements of the validating authority, as well as the probable wishes of the students themselves.

The two concurrent sections of the course each used identical materials, system, and timetable, but had different students and different tutors. The two sections had no formal engagement with each other.

An unexpected outcome emerged from the use of marking criteria. The procedure was that prior to each marking exercise, the purpose and use of the criteria were discussed with the class, and it was thereafter assumed that they were being used accordingly.

In each competition and in both sections the wide spread of marks between high and low demonstrates that the assessments by students were stringent and shows that the students were not fudging the results by aiming for some anodyne compromise.

The similarity of the results raised the thought that they may have somehow been manipulated by the students. However, there is no means by which the students could have collaborated to produce the results, because most of the marking sessions were held concurrently, and until the tutors had collected the mark-sheets and done the work of averaging the results, no one knew what any results would become.

Although it is a side issue to the subject topic of alignment of the results between the two ACL sections, a broad brush verification of the marks given by the students was made by comparison of the overall ranking of the students on the ACL course with the overall ranking of the same students in the other assessments (exams), which they had taken in the core part of the BVC course. The result of that comparison was that generally the students who were highly rated in the ACL by their peers were the same students who had received high marks from the law school tutors.

After running the course for two successive years, the author’s reflection on the outcomes for teaching and learning is that harmony within the firms plays a significant part in the success of individuals, and the converse also applies, so that it is worthwhile for the tutor to make considerable efforts at the ‘social engineering’ of compatible groups. In respect of the system of marking, the students reported that they had gained insight into the quality of their work by having the opportunity to examine and mark the scripts produced by other students who had done the same work.

As to the educational value of the students’ feedback, comments by the students referred mainly to the benefits for the ‘teacher’ rather than the ‘learners’. The knowledge that written work would be marked by other students and advocacy work would be open to challenge by the student judges were an incentive to most students to produce their best quality performances.

The students appreciated that the format of the course was very close to what they could expect in practice and they were for the most part glad to have opportunity to exercise the necessary skills in the relative safety of the university. Students who were allocated the task of acting as judges reported that they had learned a great deal about their own advocacy skills and skills of legal research, by having the opportunity to interrogate the advocate students. The obligation to produce and serve documents within the published timetable but without tutor supervision set the students upon tasks of time management and self-discipline which were challenging for some.

A future project for research could be, with student consent, to operate this reported edition of the course concurrently with a ‘conventional’ didactic version, followed by a common assessment exercise. For the moment, what can be said is that the evidence from the ACL course proves that students can have confidence in this method of peer marking, and that it gives them a reliable indicator of their performance.