Transforming Charcoals into Diamonds? Exploring Time Pressured Assessment as a Tool of Transformative Education in Law Classrooms

Abstract

Recent trend seems to indicate that undergraduate law students nowadays are so used to having several weeks or more to complete their assignments, most of the time guided by their instructor’s feedback while completing them. This is in addition to ‘spoon-feeding’, ‘powerpoint slides-based’, ‘one way street’, series of lectures done on a weekly basis to help them prepare for their final semester exams. This practice however runs counter to the reality of the legal profession where lawyers constantly work in stressful environments, under time pressure, while juggling multiple tasks involving crucial financial and live issues of their clients. This action research paper investigates the benefits and impacts of using time pressured assessment as a tool of transformative education to produce a more practice-ready graduate as expected by the industry. Using qualitative approach, it explores the concept of transformative education, and examines the use of ‘pressure’ element to prepare students for the real world, and teach them the fundamental lawyering skills needed for legal practice. At a time of declining resilience of a law graduates, a competitive legal job market, and the ever high expectation of practice-ready law graduates, this paper is paramount in answering whether law schools should reconsider its curriculum to be more transformative by adding the element of time pressured assessment.