The Standardized Client Initiative has taken a great step forward with the first cohort of Daniel Webster Scholars at Franklin Pierce Law Center becoming the first group of Law Students in the USA to take part in a high stakes interviewing assessment with Standardized Clients trained using the SCI approach.
In April of this year, Karen and Clark returned to New Hampshire to help complete the training of the Standardized Clients that was initiated in June of 2008. Over the intervening period, John Garvey and David Cleveland had worked on the scenario development and familiarization of scripts with the Clients and the next stage was to complete the assessment training and standardization. Using the tried and tested approach developed at Glasgow Graduate School of Law, we spent a very intense two days (and evenings!) with the Clients working on assessment and standard setting.
This is a process that you can't take short-cuts on and over a number of workshops using video, live interviews and lots of feedback and discussion, we arrived at the point where the New Hampshire Standardized Client group were conducting and scoring live interviews within the degree of reliability we were looking for. We had a great group of SCs who were willing to take on board all the feedback we gave and strive to get it right each time around. It is hard work, but it is always such a great feeling for the SCs to reach that point where they are confident and secure in their scoring, and for us too there is great sense of achievement at the end of the process.
The Standardised Client Initiative has got off to a tremendous start at Franklin Pierce. Our next step is to work with them to integrate Standardized Clients with a new simulation designed using the SIMPLE Platform also developed at GGSL. This will be a first for both GGSL and Franklin Pierce and another exciting project that we hope will lead the way in simulation-based Legal Education.
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