What kinds of graduates do universities wish to produce, and how should they go about doing so? Recently, Australian universities have had to grapple seriously with this question in response to the Federal government’s decision to tie the funding of each university to their quality of teaching. This note will present the steps taken by my university and department to embed attributes which are considered desirable in our graduates. Although I shall be mainly describing my experience in the discipline of law, the measures taken are readily applicable to other disciplines.

My University’s statement on graduate attributes

The starting point of the project was for my university’s Executive to decide on a list of graduate attributes. The absence of such a document may come as a surprise to people outside the tertiary education sector but it was, until recently, uncommon for Australian universities to have one. While most universities (including mine) would have ‘mission statements’, these were invariably cast in broad terms and insufficiently specific in indicating the values and skills which the university sought to produce in their graduates.

My university’s Executive instructed the on-campus Centre for Teaching and Learning to produce a draft which was then circulated among the departmental boards for comment. The final version, which was debated and eventually endorsed by the University’s Academic Board and the Senate, reads as follows:

The attributes which graduates of Southern Cross University are expected to develop during their programmes of study are:

• Intellectual rigour—a commitment to excellence in all scholarly and intellectual activities, including critical judgment.
  
  
• Creativity—a commitment to achieving imaginative and creative responses to intellectual, professional and social challenges.
  
  
• Ethical understanding and a commitment to the highest ethical standards and sensitivity to moral issues and conflicts.
  
  
• Command an area of knowledge to enable a smooth transition to professional or other scholarly settings.
  
  
• Lifelong learning—the ability to be responsive to change, to be reflective in practice and to be information literate in order to update one’s knowledge through independent and self-directed learning.
  
  
• Effective communication and social skills—the ability to communicate and collaborate in ways that are appropriate in scholarly, professional and social settings.
  
  
• Cultural awareness—a global world view encompassing a cosmopolitan outlook as well as local perspective on social and cultural issues, together with an informed respect for cultural and indigenous identity.

My department’s statement on graduate attributes

Following the issuance of the University’s statement, each department was required to produce its own discipline-specific statement of the skills and values it wanted to find in its graduates. While each department was to have the University’s statement in mind, they were encouraged to produce their own list of graduate attributes. My department, after several meetings and a two-day teaching workshop, decided on the following statement:

The Department of Law aims to achieve its mission by producing graduates who:

• Are gender, culturally, socially, politically, environmentally and ethically aware.
  
  
• Have substantial knowledge of a wide body of case law and statute law.
  
  
• Are able to express themselves clearly and concisely.
  
  
• Are capable of critical, creative and reflective thinking.
  
  
• Have high levels of practical legal skills.
  
  
• Are lifelong learners, astute to the phenomena of change.
  
  
• Achieve excellence in their field.

My department further drew up a detailed list of essential practical legal skills which included legal drafting, legal research and writing, negotiation, interviewing and teamwork.

Mapping of assessment practices against identified skills and values

The next phase of the project was to find a way of embedding each department’s list of graduate attributes in the teaching curriculum. Based on the proposition that assessment is a significant driver of student learning, my university decided to concentrate on the relationship between the desired values and skills of graduates, and the assessment tasks. Furthermore, a decision was made to confine the evaluation to the assessment tasks of compulsory subjects which all the law students were required to take. Accordingly, optional subjects were discounted even though they may have had assessment tasks which tested students on a desired attribute.

As the Director of Teaching of my department, I collaborated with an educational designer from the University’s Centre for Teaching and Learning to match the existing assessment practices of the compulsory law subjects, with the values and skills listed in my department’s statement of graduate attributes. This mapping exercise revealed a heavy concentration of assessment tasks which tested students on some of the values and skills. They included legal research and writing and the interface between gender, culture and the law. However, the mapping exercise found that certain other skills and values such as legal drafting, negotiation and teamwork were rarely assessed, if at all.

Consultation, revision and feedback

The results of the assessment mapping exercise were discussed at length at a departmental meeting. The meeting decided to reduce or omit the assessment of certain skills and values in some of the core subjects, and to increase or introduce other skills and values in other core subjects. Subsequently, the Centre for Teaching and Learning assisted those lecturers whose subjects were affected to modify their assessment tasks in line with the department’s directives.

This is as far as my department has reached in this project. A range of staff and student feedback mechanisms is currently being considered for implementation. These mechanisms will monitor and determine the efficacy of the changes made to the assessment tasks of the core law subjects. Additionally, a representative group of recent law graduates from my university has been interviewed to appraise their views of the extent to which they have learnt the values and skills listed in my department’s statement of graduate attributes. Four years from now, a similar group of law graduates will be interviewed to determine the extent to which the revised assessment regime has been successful in embedding the law department’s stated list of graduate attributes into the curriculum. A comparison of the two sets of survey results should yield valuable insights into the assessment practices, both past and present, of the law department.

Conclusion

The project I have described has not been without its difficulties. Getting law lecturers to agree about basic matters such as the values and skills they consider essential in a law graduate, was a significant achievement. Likewise, a fair level of tact was needed to persuade individual lecturers to modify their existing assessment tasks. The promise and supply of assistance from staff members of the Centre for Teaching and Learning proved critical. But the hard work has been well rewarded. In particular, there has been an increase in collegiality among my department’s teaching staff, created by a shared vision to produce the ideal law graduate, however idealistic or illusive that objective might be!

References

Brown, S. and Knight, P. (1994). Assessing Learners in Higher Education. London: Kogan Page.

Coaldrake, P. (1998). ‘Reflections on the Repositioning of the Government’s Approach to Higher Education’, Keynote address, Reworking the University Conference, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia. pp.1–17.

Ramsden, P. (1992). Learning to Teach in Higher Education. New York: Routledge.

Rowntree, D. (1987). Assessing Students: How Shall We Know Them? (2nd edition). London: Kogan Page.