Mooting within the curriculum as a vehicle for learning: student perceptions

Extensive scholarship has investigated the role of oral assessment in education, not only as a means to test and develop the specific rhetorical skills required of lawyers, but also more generally, as a means to assess and develop generic and transferable skills. Because it is important to understand student reaction (McDowell 2001) we wanted to obtain an understanding of student perceptions of one specific form of oral assessment, namely mooting, located within the curriculum. This paper therefore considers the responses of second year LLB undergraduate students to an online survey as well as the data collected from semi-structured interviews – both conducted after completion of the module and both of which were designed to elicit students' views of their experiences of mooting within the curriculum as a vehicle for learning and developing key skills. The findings indicate that students perceive summatively assessed mooting as an effective tool for developing the skills they need to move into employment on graduation, whatever their choice of career.