It’s really good to hear that you’ve been having such positive results with your students and Standardized Clients in your classes. We’ve been using SCs here at Glasgow Graduate School of Law (Scotland, UK) for both training/feedback with our students and found similar results. But we’ve also gone one stage further and use our SCs in assessment too.

In a joint project with Georgia State University we conducted research that showed that assessment by SCs was sufficiently valid and reliable to be used for high stakes assessment, and based on that reserach we have now been using SCs for the past two years as the sole means of assessing our students’ interviewing/counselling skills.

Like you, we have certainly seen a general improvement in students’ engagement and performance using this method.

If you are interested in more detail about our work, and the results of the research project, you might be interested in reading our artcle: Barton K, Maharg P, Cunningham C, Jones G, (2006) Valuing what clients think: standardized clients and the assessment of clinical competence, The Clinical Law Review, Volume 13 Number1 (1-65).