Sydney Law School is notorious for its hars’ and out of date assessment regime, compared to other universities. With infrequent class participation assessments, and traditional heavily weighted final exams being common amongst every compulsory unit, the existing assessment structure does not prepare students for modern legal practice, nor provide students with a well-rounded education, assessing them across a variety of formats.
Highly weighted exams at USyd Law are commonplace. Apart from the introductory course, 13 of the 16 mandatory law units in the LLB degree in 2024 have a final exam weighted at the maximum amount of 60% (which has been reduced slightly from 70% following COVID). Torts and Contracts II is the only major exception having regular small in-class quizzes, weighted at 20% each. Highly weighted exams have been criticised for encouraging cramming, as the absence of regular, spaced-out assessments throughout the semester means that students often leave their preparation until the end. Although a concern from the pre-COVID era of many exams being closed book has largely been rectified, such exams still place high levels of stress upon students to learn mass amounts of course content, due to extreme time pressure.
These highly weighted final exams only exacerbate the stress that law students place upon themselves and ultimately limit the opportunity for students to be examined on their understanding of the course material in a variety of methods, such as assignments, in-class quizzes, class participation and other forms of oral assessment.
When asked if exams were still useful to students a University spokesperson said “Exams and tests will remain important to determine a student’s learning in law, particularly within our professional degree programs.”
They said assessments are crafted based on “unit-level and course review” that “balance a number of factors including assessment load and the time students need for learning relevant content before it is assessed.” Instructors are also encouraged to “use a range of assessment methods.”
Assessable class participation warrants greater weight across the Sydney LLB degree as it equips students with the necessary skills to be a good lawyer and communicate effectively with clients. This assessment format usually requires each student to be ‘on call’ for one or two tutorials/seminars each semester. In these weeks, students need to be familiar with the readings for that week, lead discussion and be prepared to answer questions from the tutor. This system, at a minimum, ensures students will do the requisite study for their in-call weeks, meaning not everything is left until the very end. But the on-call system also has the opposite effect, where students only do the work for their allocated week. However, it is hard to see why we need an on-call system for assessing class participation, rather than a continual form of assessing class participation. The on-call system is also problematic due to the in-consistent on-call methods between tutors, which depending on the method, results in a slightly harsher mode of assessment across classes. Whilst The latter provides students with more and regular opportunities in classes throughout the semester to contribute, rather than discussions in classes to be dominated by a back-and-forth discussion between the tutor and one or two students on call, leaving the rest of the class not as engaged as they could be.
Despite the benefits of class participation as an assessment component, of the seventeen mandatory units in the Sydney LLB and JD degrees, less than half of them assess class participation. Class participation is allocated relatively highly at 20% for some of the early subjectslike Foundations of Law, Contracts, and Civil and Criminal But others like Public Law and Public International Law have no marks given for participation. Seven of the nine compulsory fourth- and fifth-year units have no weighting to class participation, with only Corporations Law (10%) and The Legal Profession (20%) having it as an assessable component. Viva Voces and oral exams, where the examiners ask students questions to test the oral skills of future lawyers have been employed as assessments at other universities, such as Western Sydney University (WSU) but these practical skills are not heavily assessed at USYD. Allocating greater weight to class participation would ensure that the assessment format at Sydney Law is more reflective of the modern legal practice, it would ensure students with skills sets in strong communication and an ability to think quickly that go beyond the traditional exam focus can thrive.
Sydney law’s schools’ assessment format has remained steeped in utilising traditional formats of assessment, notably heavily weighted final exams and limiting the marks attributed to class participation, placing additional stress on students and limiting the opportunity for them to showcase their range of skills and be assessed in a variety of ways.
The University spokesperson confirmed that a review of assessments would be part of a revamp of both the LLB and JB next year. The Law School should ultimately evaluate whether this current assessment format, which has been utilised over a long period of time, really equips students the best to become effective modern lawyers.
