Clinic Evaluations

Just as it is important for students to receive ongoing feedback from faculty supervisors, it is equally important for supervisors to solicit feedback from students about their teaching and administration.

At the end of a student’s time in a clinic they will have had some kind of experience. We all hope that it has been a good experience, but it will be an experience in any regard. A mid-term evaluation followed by an end of the term evaluation is a good way to capture student feedback and incorporate it into future plans. Most mainstream law school evaluations are not designed to capture the totality of a clinical experience. In order to get good feedback that will be useful for future terms, it may be necessary for clinicians to design their own evaluation forms. (See Evaluations and Surveys for more information).

As with much of the process that we have discussed, technology has increased the modes by which we can solicit this feedback. Surveymonkey or any other online polling tool will allow anonymous feedback that can be easily summarized in a report created by the software and easily exportable to an excel file. Of course, there is nothing wrong with the old fashioned hard-copy evaluation either.